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TO MY TWO FRIEND! <E DUOBUS UNUM>:

HUGH M'DIARMID

AND

CM*GRIEVE

LIKEWISE

TO TM EVBRLAtTING OLORY OF THOSB FEW

MEN

BUSSED AND IAN<TIPIB> IN TM
<URtti AND EXECRATIONS OF TMOSC

MANY

WHOSi MMISG If BTHMAL DAMNATION

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

A Zoroastrian Musician in Dorset 4

Aiound Kaikhosru Sorabji 9

Opus Clavicembalisticutn - a Brief History 21

Shortform-Analysis of Opus Clavicembalistictun 28

Opus Clavicembaiisticum - a Critical Analysis 37

Kaikhosru Sorabji and Herman Melville 72

Notes on the Life and Cateer of Sorabji 80

Chronological List of Works 84

On the 4th of May, 1985, 1 received a hastily typewritten letter:
"Dear Mi. Rke,

Go straight ahead with the proposed recording
of my Opus Clavicembaiisticum. No objections at all.
Yours sincerely,
K.S. Sorabji."

Sorabji's so-called 'ban' on the performance of his music stemmed from his hchet that the music is
"for serious performers and serious hsteners only." The fact that he consented to performances and
recordings since 1976 indicates that towards the end of his life he came to believe that the time might
be right for the music to be made public, and, indeed, that he wanted it to be heard. 1 do not believe
that any composer writes music intending it not to be heard, least of all the creator of such vital,
compellii^ music as Sorabji's. For all its overpublicised complexity, it is the opposite of obsciu:e. It
has the power to grip an audience, arouse extraordinary tensions, and precipitate their release in
tumultuous ovarion. Mere cerebral note-complex weavii^ cannot achieve this. If diere is still
resistance to Sorabji's music in the minds of the public and their guiding critics and commentators,
it must be due ro misconceptions. Firstly, there is danger in being too different, and not admitting of
ready comparisons with well-understood musical trends. Most of the argument in human thought
is by comparison and analogy, and comprehension is almost always achieved by argument, in the
broadest sense of the word. To encounter a nuisical vocabulary which does not fit snugly into a
disctissioii of the e\olving musical styles of the Twentieth century must be very galling to certain
orderly-minded individuals who do not like to have to evaluate things on their own terms without
the benefit of the prompting of received opinion. "Why do 1 write as I do? Why did (and do) the
artist-craftsmen of Iran, India, China, Byzantine-Arabic Sicily ... produce the sort of elaborate
highly wrought work they did? That was their way. It is also mine. If you don't like it . . . that is just
too bad, but not for me, who couldn't care less." Such ferocious independence of spirit has earned
Sorabji not a few enemies in a world of feshionable conformity. Secondly, there is the pioblem
of Sorabji's absolute refusal to disclose in verbal detail what his music is 'about'. It has become
fashionable for modem composers to tell us — in words — exacdy what they want us to hear in their
music. If, as Carl Nielsen said, "music is the sound of life", then this is a fundamentally imhelpfiil

distortion, since no aspect of life can be expected glibly to yield up its secrets in the reading of the
printed paragraph of a programme note. Ronald Stevenson has written of one of his own major
compositions that it may appear like the map of a life, expressed in music. (Note the absence of detail
in this description; every listener's life has its own chronography, so the supply of ideas to be 'found'
in such a piece, viewed in such a way, is inexhaustible). Sorabji's compositions, like vast tracts of life,
are to be lived through, and the listener must extract what understanding he or she can from the
experience. Of course there will be ambiguity, complexity, and an absence of comfortable solutions.
This will always be so, except for those who observe the world from a viewpoint of ill£uitiie
simplicity, and see life in black and white. There will also be the indescribable richness of sensation
is available to us all, and which the greatest composers take the trouble to try to describe to the
test of us.

An important task remains; to acknowledge the unique powers of the performer on this recording.
John Ogdon is the ideal interpreter for this music. He has transcended the bounds, not only of
conventional pianism, but of conventional musicianship in his interpretation, both intellectual and
emotional, of the work, and in his technical execution of the formidable task whose end result is
before you.

I am very gready indebted to Alistair Hinton for his assistance during the preparation of this

recording.

C.H.R.

Siw October. 1988

John Ogdon with Ronald Stevenson, 1985.
Copyright ©1 985, C.H.R.

A Zoxoastrian Musician in Dorset

Ronald Stevenson

A creative musician in Britain is a rarity, an outsider. So a Zoroa^trian musician in Britain is a

positive miracle.

Or iit Icasr a curiosity.

A curiosity invites curiosity. So 1 shall assume that the iiiviiatiou to the reader's curiosity has been
accepted and that he will read these pages in the spirit ol Haroun ai Raschid, looking for adventure.

It was not only old Khayyam wiio bade us "leave the Lot / Of Kaikobad and Kaikliosru forgot".
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji is not so much forgot as unknown. That he should have remained so, is
a serious indictment of the contemporary world of music.

Sorabji is emphatically unlike the Englishman, whose face, once seen, is never remembered.

Already, before we discuss his music, his name makes a music for us, all its own. It is a name as
strange to Western ears 3S an English name must be unspeakably dull to Eastern ears. Kaikhosru
Shapurji Sorabji — they are eponymic names from the Iranian pantheon. Let us take them
separately.

KAIKHOSRU = Persian for King Cyrus the Great of Persia; founder of the Persian Empire; a true

upholder of the Zoroastrian religion.

This name is svtnbolic of Sorabji the innovator and Sorabji the conservator. It is the cypher of his
lofty aloofness from Milton's "miscellaneous rabble who extol / Things vulgar ". It is also an earnest of
his credo, that of the ancient Zarathustra, which precedes Christ by a whole millennium.

SHAPURJI = 'Son of the King'.

The regality of the (irst name is underlined by the second, to make assurance doubly sure. Here we
have to do with no milk-and-water democrat. Here is a musician for the Temple, not for the concert
hall. And, as Ezra Pound reminds us.

The temple 1 1 1 is holy, because it is not for sale.

SORABJI - an equation which a few words cannot contain, but which the following thoughts may
go some way towards clarifying. Sorabji is a Parsi, a Zoroastrian from India, but not of it. On a
postcard to the authot, he has elucidated this point with charactetistic brio;

"The English (the stupidest race in Europe, Kayserling called them) call anyone who comes
FROM India but not OF it ... INDIAN ... as who should call a kitten emerging from a dog kennel
a puppy? ... They would if they were goddamfools like the English."
(One learns to expect no eirenicon from Sorabji. His Ubations are vials of vitriol.)

. His ancestral roots were in Irdn, Spain and Sicily. From ancient Itin he derives his richly ornate
otaftsmanship and spiritual dedication to the highest; to Spain he owes his sombre and scintillating
exoticism, which glows and flickers in the sable and sanguine colours of his music; and from Sicily he
inherits his fierce independence of spirit.

Race — not 'racism' — niatiers to him. The waters that have flowed between the countries of his
amphibious birthright have nor diluted his blood. To him, borders are FRONTIERS.

He has set himself to guard the frontiers of art. His watchtower is Corfe Casrie, Dorset, where he
has lived long in superb solitude. 1 hat watchtower is not a 'tower of ivory': ir is a granite tower. In a
world that is a stage, as Shakespeare saw it, or a village, as l.eopardi saw it, and which is now in
'danger of becoming a monstrous 'Siibtopia' of fiuietional tubular girders — scath)lding and scaffold
B "for millions of hollow men — Sorabji is seciue and sane in his metaphysical granitic tower. His
uniqueness is not madness: the madness is what surrounds us. It behoves us not to accuse such a man
of madness in this twentieth century, which resembles Lilliput more and more every day. Sorabji,
physically small, is spiritually large. In a day of quasi-universal pygmean scale, when men's spiritual
Stature seems in inverse proportion to their scientific discoveries, perhaps Sorabji is bound to appear
eccentric. He is certainly 'outside the circle' if the circle is taken to mean the dull diurnal round of
brilliant mediocrity. And, though his largesse of genius made him a superlative critic in the pages of
'The New Age' and in many learned (and not-so-learned) journals of music you must not expect to
find him in the Grand Circle of Critics. Nor will you come upon him in the Grand Circle at the
Festival Hall, nor in the Albert Hall, for he hates concerts that 'promote' (like a boxing-match) music
which he does not wish to hear, and that are 'patronised' by people whom he does not want to meet.
But if by 'circle' you mean somethii^ like what Goethe meant when he spoke of 'world citizenship'

and 'world language', than you must take account of Sorabji; and he will be inside that circle, not
outside it, because that circle will be big enough to include him. His distinguished ancestry and his
unique creative gift are twin points of a compass that describes a circle which embraces both Orient
and Occident. A navigator determines his position b\- rclcrcncc to the east; then, accotdingly, to all
points of the compass. It is not for nothing that this is called 'orientation'. Sorabji, like
C. M. Doughty, indicates the emergent significance of the East for the West. Western art needs a new
orientation; it has been waiting ready for whole millennia in the East.

The difficulty of writing about Sorabji is that one's prose threatens to become cornucopean in the
attempt to say something about SO abundant a creative enei^. To attempt to write about him in one
language is like trying to contain the seven seas in one pail, or a djinn in a bottle. One finds oneself
becoming multilingual out of necessity, not out of a jejune emulation of the literary style of Ezra
Pound. No ordinary book can be written about such an extraordinary man and musician as Sorabji:
it must at least be a heptaglot! This clamant question of words is a hard one — as hard as the couch
of words itself For couched words must be. And the role of accoucheur is never without at least the
possibility of hazard. We glimpse the difficulty as soon as we tackle the question of Sorabji's racial
background and are obliged to invoke the names of Iran, Spain and Sicily.

There is a sense in which artists, throughout the world, form a race of their own, a race apart, like
a lost tribe. Certainly, the history of music is bedevilled by a peculiar type of schizophrenia unknown
to the psychiatrist. One finds it cropping up in all the 'histories' when the historian braves the
quicksands of original genius: such men as Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Mahler, Delius, Busoni ... and
Sorabji, among others. To take a few: Berlioz is totally unlike any other French composer; both Poland
and France claim Chopin; Busoni — a pure Italian — was known as a German in Italy and as
an Italian in Germany. But the umbilical cord cannot connect to more than one placenta;
fundamentally, every great artist is nourished by one country. It has nothing to do with leagues of
distance (or of nations). As in the Hans Andersen story, every great artist is connected to his
spiritual source by an invisible umbilical cord, and the further he travels away from that source, the
more it hurts him and the more his art sutlers.

So Sorabji is a Parsi composer, domiciled in Dorset. He loathes lexicographers, so expect to find
no data here. (You will find little elsewhere, and what you find will baffle extremely). He has
composed the longest symphonic works in the literature of music. If they were merely great in length.

they would hardly warrant comment; but as some people believe they are great in content, the
reader must be prepared not to overlook what can only appear as a very strange case indeed — a
Zoroastrian musician in Dorset! — but positively to accept it, to give it credence, fabulous and
legendary as it all sounds, and to conserve patience in the hope of discovering what some artists
(among them John Ireland, York Bowen, Roger Quilter, Edmund Rubbra, Delius, Sir Osbert and
Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, Sir William Walton, Frarids George Scott, Hugh M'Diarmid, Alban Berg,
Sir Donald Francis Tovey, Ernest Newman and Busoni) believed to be a considerable contribution to
the history of music.

Kaikhosru Sorabji, 1988.

Azound Kaikhosru Soiahji

AliBtair Hint on

Sorabji's life-story is hardly rhc snitl of which best-sellers are made, short as it is on such essentials
as scandals, public image-making, opportunism and the like. For all his phenomenal creative and
performing gifts, the ways of the international jct-scr virmoso and of the cult-composer were never
his. The horror of appearing at large gatherings of people, the desire to protect his music from the
unwelcome attentions of ill-equipped performers and listeners, and the deep distaste for the
indulgence in hype, especially self-hype, of creative musicians are just a few of the things that made
Sorabji the intensely private man he always was. The Scottish poet, friend and contemporary (almost
to the day) of Sorabji, Hugh M'Diarmid, ends his chapter on the composer in his book The
Company I've Kept (1966) with this paragraph: —

"A great composer, a great critic and a prince among men, I know nothing about Sorabji
(none of the particulars men usually know of each other, family affeirs, education, hobbies,
etc.) — nothing, but 1 think everything that matters, everything, as Jeeves would say,
that is 'of the essence'."

Sorabji s \iic could hardly be described as uneventful, though almost all the major events in it are
his very few public appearances as a performer and his very many musical compositions and essays.
The quiet dignity essential to the truly great creative/recreative artist is given expression in Sorabji's
essays 'Performance versus Celebration' and 'Attitudes of Mind towards Music.'' The well-ordered and
harmonious private life without die benefit of which, he believed, such an artist cannot be fiilly
prepared to meet the supreme spiritual, intellectual and physical demands made upon him by his
■work, is touched upon in his chapter on Bernard van Dieren.^ Malcolm Boyd's article on Medtner

(a composer much admired by Sorabji) in the 1980 edition of Grove ends with this sentence that
could equally well be appUed to Sorabji himself: "[Medtnet's] dedication to what lie considered the
immutable laws of his art was such that for him composition amounted almost to a profession of faith
and, despite its strong appeals to the emotions, his music has a priestly quality to which not everyone
can respond." The rationale behind Sorabji's strongly self-imposed way of life is perhaps best and most
succinctly summed up in his essay 'U Gran Rifiuto'.^

Needless to say, Sorabji almost always refused interviews with journalists and often made a point
of providing misleading information about himself to lexicographers. He did take part in recoided
interviews for the BBC for the centenaries in 1980 of Medtner and the Scots composer Francis
George Scott, but the only noteworthy exception to his rule concerning interviews about himself
occurred in 1977, when London Weekend Television made a programme about him. However, on
that occasion, he insisted on a number of conditions being met before consenting to this interview —
firstly that it should take place in his own home in Dorset; secondly that no live filming be done (and
he permitted still photographs only after some persuasion); thirdly, that under no circumstances
woiild he play the piano during its course; and lasdy that he reserved the right to terminate it as soon
as he saw fit. The exception proved the rule with a vengeance in this instance. The interview
nevertheless did take place, although a good many of the questions, reasonable as they were, turned
out to be both longer and less pndly than his answers. The programme, presented by the
interviewer, Russell Harty, and which also included contributions from Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, Yonty
Solomon, Felix Aprahamian and myself, was shown, though Sorabji, who never possessed or wished
to possess a television set, neither saw it nor wanted to see it.

The majority of journalists no doubt view the prospect of interviewing the purposeful (and, in this
case, purposefully) inaccessible figure of importance as a challenge, even when no such 'challenge' is
actually being set by the potential subject of such an interview. Much has been made of Sorabji's
alleged 'eccentricity' in his hard-line attitudes over such matters. 1 have even heard him described on
one occasion as a 'typical crusty English eccentric', although it seems hard to imagine how a
Parsi born of an Indian father could manage to quaUfy as anything 'English'. Admittedly, it is perhaps
equally hard to imi^ne any composer besides Sorabji issuing such a printed notice as the fbllowii^ —

"TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, IF ANY, AND OTHERS WHO
MIND ANYBODY'S BUSINESS BUT THEIR OWN

"Dates and places of birth relating to myself given in various works of reference are
invariably hise.

"It is also stated that my name, my real name, diat is the one I am known by, is not
my teal name. Now one is given one's name — one's authentic ones — at some such
ceremony as baptism, Christenii^, or the like, on the occasion of one's formal reception into
a certain religious Faith. In the ancient Zarathustrian Parsi community to which, on my
father's side, I have the honour to belong, this ceremony is normally performed, as in other
Faiths, in childhood, or owing to special circumstances as in my case, later in life, when I
assumed my name as It now is or, in the words of the legal document in which this is
mentioned "... received into the Parsi community and in accordance with the custom and
tradition thereof, is now and will be henceforth known as ..." and here follows my name as
now.

"Certain lexicographical canaille, one egregious and notorious specimen
particularly, enraged at my complete success in defeating and frustratii^ their impudent
impertinent and presumptuous nosings and pryings into what does not concern them, and
actuated no doubt by the mean malice of the base bom for their betters, have thought, as
they would say, to take out it of me by si^esting that my name isn't really my name.

"Insects that are merely noisome like to think that they can also sting."

with its underlining handwritten postscript (from Pope): —

"But let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings."

Sorabji, however, was no poseur, no image-maker or headline-creator. He simply took a view
diametrically opposed, it would appear, firom that of Grainger and, more particularly, perhaps.

from some of our present-day musicologists, in regard to this aspect of 'composer exposure'. He never
sought to diarise his Ufe and the prospect of autobiography would have appalled and disgusted him.
He once put to me the rhetotical question of whether, and if so, to what extent, a foreknowledge of
the syphilis and grave mental depression suffered respectively by Wolf and Duparc is essential to a
thorough understanding of the work of two of Europe's greatest song-composers, adding that an
awareness of what Gesualdo and Mozart got up to in their private lives or the manner in which
Wagner treated many of those around him would likewise be useless tovrards an appreciation of the
music of those composers. "All that matters", as he often pointed out, "is the music itself and one's
intellectual and emotional response to it. The rest is mere muck-raking, is of interest only as such and
is the concern only of the muck-rakers and their mindless readership." M'Diarmid clearly shares
Sorabji's attitudes here, in the suggestion that he not only 'knows nothing' but also feels no need to
know anything of the details of Sorabji's lifestyle.

There are some precedents here, of course. Sorabji's decision to put an end to his public appearances
as a pianist is, in a way, reminiscent of the similar attitudes of two of the 19th century's greatest
pianists, Liszt (in later life) and Alkan (during most of his life). Indeed, Alkan's general reclusiveness
has soinething in common with that of Sorabji. In more recent times, two giants of the keyboard,
Horowia and Michelangeli, for one reason or another, spent considerably more time off the concert
platform than on it, so to speak. The chief difference here is that Sorabji's last public recital in
December 1936 remained his last. Schumann's famous cri de coeur to the critics "... pick out the fifths
and leave us in peace" appears to share something with Sorabji's attitudes towards what he calls the
"muck-rakers". The French composer Magnard shunned all publicity where his music was concerned,
though he did not go as far as Sorabji and place an all-out embargo on public performances of his
work without his prior consent. The copious creativity of Ives and Brian was thwarted respectively
only by the onset of illness and the onset of old age, rather than by the lack of performances.
Skalkottas spent the last one-third or so of his short life composing at considerable speed a vast body
of works not only without specific performance prospects but, it would seem, without even telling
those closest to him that he was doing so. In this respect, Skalkottas perhaps went even further than
Sorabji who, at least in letters to close friends, at times mentioned a little about what he had
recently completed and what he was currendy working on (though rarely in much detail).

The brief article on Sorabji in the 1949 edition of the Oscar Thompson International Cyclopedia
of Music and Musicians speaks of "... the composer's conviction being that music should be
accessible only to those of the highest skill." Whilst this is not in itself untrue, as a casual ^ance at
almost any of Sorabji's bigger scores will demonstrate, two things muit first be properly understood.
With regard to the skills required by performer and listener alike, Sorabji has never gone out of his
way to create difficulties in order to render his woric more remote and recondite, having not the
slightest inteiest in either difficulty or simplicity for dieir own sakes, and the fact that learning his
major works no more fits into a perfiDrmer's usual schedules than the works themselves fit into
normal concert programmes is a difficulty Sorabji saw as imposed not by himself but by the
conventions of the concert career as it is generally understood. Also, on the matter of accessibility,
Sorabji saw his compositions as intended for a small circle of his close friends rather than for general
consumption by the concertgoing public. These friends included, in the main, the dedicatees of his
works, although in most cases, unless fortunate enough to hear Sorabji playing them, even they have,
for the most part (at least until recently) had to be content only with the knowledge of their existence
and the honour of the dedication. James Payn wrote of"... the well-nigh universal habit of literary
lying and pretence of admiration for certain works of which in reality we know very litde, and for
which, if we knew more, we should perhaps care even less." ' It is but a short distance between this
idea and that of Sorabji illustrating his lack of interest in public approbation by saying that he
cannot possibly concern himself with responses to his work from listeners "of whom he knows
nothing, and of whom, if he knew more, he would care even less."

However, to return to the matter of events in Sorabji's life: one occasion of great importance,
which Sorabji certainly regarded as such, was his one meeting in London in 1919 with Busoni. At
this stage, the 27-year-old Sorabji had to his credit four piano concertos (and was contemplating
another), a number of songs and a few piano works including the Fantaisie espagnole and the First
Piano Sonata. Sorabji asked Busoni if he could help him get the sonata published but only after
Busoni had insisted on hearing the younger composer, despite his protests of modesty, play it to him,
virith the words "Never mind, do what you can; music is, after all, to be heard, and I cannot play it."

So we have on the one hand Sorabji's belief in his music being intended and suitable only for a
small circle of like-minded friends and, on the other, Busoni's statement to him "music is, after all, to
be heard." Since the mid-1970s when Sorabji began consenting to certain public performances,
broadcasts and recordings of his music, the opportunity has been afforded to us to discover which of
the two men was right. Sorabji's music is never likely to suffer the fate of the sort of mass public appeal
that has befallen such works as Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Beethoven's Fitth Symphony and the first and
second piano concertos respectively by Tchaikovsky and Rakhmaninov through no &ult attributable
to those composers. It has, nevertheless, become abundandy clear that those of Sorabji's works which
have now been heard have touched the emotions and intellects of a far greater number of those "of
whom he knew nothing" than he would have believed possible.

1. From "Around Music" (Unicorn Press, 1932)

2. From "Mi Contra Fa" (Porcupine Press, 1947)

3. From "Some Private Views" (Ixjndon, 1881)

In December 1959, John Ogdon gave a private performance of Opus Clavicemballstlcum at Ronald Stevenson's
house in West Linton, Scotland. This was the only occasion on which the work was played to flia dedicatee,
Christopher Grieve (Hugh M'DlarmId). This ramarkahio series of photographs, taken during this unique event, are by
ttw Edinburgh photographer, Helmut Petzseh. Copyright ®1959, Helmut Petzsch.

Ogdon, Grieve, Stevenson

Stevenson, Grieve

Ogdon, Grieve

OpuB Clavicezahalisticum — a Brief History

AliBiair Hinton

Sorabji regarded his First Organ Symphony (1923-24) as his earliest truly personal and mature
work, much as Busoni thought of his own Second Sonata for violin and piano. He said that, in
retrospect, he regarded his earlier music as "efforts, not particularly successful, to find my direction
as a composer", and it is perhaps fair to suggest that the nearest he ever came to a change of approach
was between the quasi-expressionist near-atonal (at times) Second and Third Piano Sonatas and the
first of his three monumental works for organ solo. Another mammoth work, the Variations and
Fugue on 'Dies Irae' for piano (1923-26) (not to be confused with his even larger and much later
Sequentia Cydica on the same theme), was dedicated to the memory of Busoni, to whom Sorabji
had already dedicated his Km and Second Piano Sonatas. Whilst it might be misleading to over-
estimate the growing influence of Busoni on Sorabji at this time (and it must be said that Busoni,
though he admired Sorabji, did not find that what he heard of his music appealed to him
personally, much as it fascinated him), the stylistic transition in Sorabji between his works before and
after 1923 could be said to reflect a transition between the influence of Busoni of the Sonatina
Seconda and Busoni of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica.

The establishment in the mid- 1 920s of Sorabji's preoccupation with fiigal composition and with
theme-and-variation form in general (and passacaglia-with-variations in particular) went hand in
hand with an increasing awareness of the importance to him of the works of the Netherlands school,
of Palestrina and most especially of Bach, and this at a time when he was gradually growing away
from many of the trends in post-First- World- War European music. As a result, the foundation-stones
for Opus ClavicembaUsticum could then be laid.

Destined to be the crowning acliievement of his piano works thus far, the Opus was begun in
1929. Its title was originally intended to be Opus Sequentiale, and its structural layout bears
resemblances to that of Busoni's Fantasia G>ntnppimtistica, with the principal difference that the
Sorabji work also takes in four short lai^y moto-perpetuo-Wke virtuosic movements and two massive
sets of variations; furthermore, it is more dian seven times the size of Busoni's Fantasia.

During the course of its composition, Sorabji's very dear Scots friend Erik Chisholm (who almost
single-handedly was the Glasgow-based Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music),
began trying to persuade the composer to perform Opus Clavicembalisticum, once completed, in
Glasgow. Chisholm, a composer himself and an astonishingly enterprising and courageous figure
in Scottish musical life at that time, founded his Society for the purposes of attracting major
international European composers to Scotland to talk about and perform their work. Amongst those
who took part during the late 1920s and the 1930s were van Dieren, Bartok, Hindemith and
Szymanowski, and Sorabji himself gave four performances for Chisholm in the Society's series of
concerts.

As work on the Opus continued apace, frequent correspondence between Sorabji and Chisholm
recounted its progress, though not in much detail, and Sorabji gave the first of his performances for
Chishoim's Society in the spring of 1930. On this occasion he gave the premiere (and the only
performance until 2002) of his Fourth Piano Sonata. Despite their close fiiendship and mutual
admiration, Chisholm had to do a good deal of sensitive and persuasive tactical manoeuvrii^ and
Sorabji a good deal of heart-searching before the performance of Opus Gaivicembalisticuin could be
agreed upon and scheduled.

Sorabji's letter to Chisholm of 25.06.1930 includes the following paragraph: —

"With a racking head and literally my whole body shaking as with ague I write
this and tell you I have just this afternoon early finished Clavicembalisticum (252 pages —
loi^ than Dies IRAE and immeasurably better ... the final Coda Stretta k an achievement
with the 4 forms of each subject nmning throi^ die &bric linked with quotations of earlier

fugue subjects declaimed with massive vehemence[.] the closing 4 pages are as cataclysmic
and catastrophic as anything I've ever done — the harmony bites like nitric acid the
counterpoint grinds like the mills of God to close finally on this implacable monosyllable:

*ffff*

"I am the Spirit that denies!"

But how it's drained me ... I feel like Christ when he said "Virtue has gone out of me!" And
I too: all my courage, all my strength!!"

Needless to say, the premiere of Opus Clavicembalisticum was received with suitable
astonishment. This took place in Stevenson Hall, Glasgow, on December 1st, 1930, and the
composer apparendy decided on the spur of the moment not to take the expected breaks between
each of the work's three parts, for fiar of the possible consequences of interrupting his flow.

Opus Clavicembalisticum was published in 1931 by Curwen of London. Waldheim-Eberle of
Vienna were engaged to undertake the printing, and the edition, in spite of the composer's
proof-reading, contains quite a number of errors throughout the course of its 252 large pages.
Reviewers of this publication included Havergal Brian, Alec Rowley (in The IVIusical Times), Ralph
Hill (in The Chesterian), Edmund Rubbra (in The Monthly Musical Record) and M. C. van de
Rovaart (in the Dutch De Muziekbode). I he appearance of this monolith in print, priced at
2 guineas, aroused much enthusiastic admiration and respect.

The manuscript of the Opus was given by the composer to Erik Chisholm, who later gave it to
the music library of the University of Cape Town, where he (Chishohn) had by that time become Dean

of the Music Faculty. Curiously, a short analytical note on the work, together with a thematic index,
appears in Sorabji's hand as an appendix to the manuscript. No clue is given as to why or for whose
benefit he wrote this, and it seems to be a well-nigh unique instance of Sorabji relaxing somewhat his
customary atdtude of "never apologise, never explain". In any event, it was not included in the
publication of the Opus. Sorabji gave the proo& for publication to his dear firiend Norman Peterkin,
whose heirs now own them.

The next public performance appears to have been of its first part only This took place in March

1936 in London when a well-meaning but sadly ill-equipped pianist distended it to at least twice
its proper length. Edward Clarke Ashworth's review in The New English Weekly of this most
unfortunate event bemoans the fact that the composer was not secured to give the performance, in
place of the inadequate John Tobin. Humphrey Searle recalled that Tobin's account seemed to show
no concept of the composer's intentions (Searle had previously studied the score with considerable
interest), and that it was disappointingly unrecognisable as Sorabji. This mishap may have been a
contributory factor to Sorabji's decision soon afterwards to place the embargo on public
performances without his express permission, "no performance at all" as he put it, being "vastly
preferable to an obscene travesty."

An essay by Erik Chisholm with a descriptive catalogue of some of Sorabji's works, indudit^ a
couple of ps^es on the Opus, was published by the Music Department of Oxford University Press in
1939, shortly after they assumed the sole selling agency for Sorabji's published musical worics.

The first truly masterly and detailed analysis of Opus Clavicembalisticum, including 35 music

examples, was written by Scottish composer/pianist Ronald Stevenson in 1961 as part of a proposed
symposium on Sorabji whose other contributors were John Ogdon and Hugh M Diarmid, dedicatee
of the Opus. The analysis is published for the fitst time in the ptesent volume. Ogdon gave a private
performance of the Opus in Stevenson's home in 1959 (29 years to the day after Sorabji's premiere)
in the presence of Stevenson and M'Diarmid. Stevenson himself, whose astounding pianism is well
known, must also have spent considerable time in those days practising the Opus (though he has
never actually performed it). This analysis, made in the absence of any public performances.

broadcasts or recordings and relying entirely on Stevenson's composet/pianist insights and on one
private hearing of John Ogdon, is therefore all the more remarkable. Regrettably, the symposium was
never published complete, although part of a discussion of Sorabji between its three contributots
which was intended as one of its chapters was later included in M'Diarmid's book The Company I've
Kept', in a chapter on the composer. The essays A Zoroastrian Musician in Dorset and Kaikhosru
Sorabji and Herman Melville, reproduced in the ptesent publicadon, were also intended for
inclusion in the symposium.

Paid Rapoport's book Opus Est^ includes Sorabji as one of the 'six composers from Northern
Europe' which are its subject-matter. Rapoport selects one work. Opus Clavicembalisticum, for a
detailed study in his chapter on Sorabji.

Opus Clavicembalisticum went out of print late in 1977, and was in faa the first of Sorabji's 14
published musical works under the control of Oxford University Press to achieve this status. In

common with each of the others, when stocks became exhausted, the composer declined reprints. All
of the oiiginal publications wete out of print before Sorabji's death in 1988.

Australian pianist Geofftey Douglas Madge was given permission by the composer to perform
Opus Clavicembalisticum in public in 1980. During the Holland Festival in June that year Madge
gave four performances of its first two movements, one of which was broadcast live. He also gave a
further broadcast for ABC Television in Australia the following month. In the same year, an LP record
of American pianist Michael Habermann, devoted entirely to Sorabji, was issued and this also
included the fitst two movements of the Opus.

Geoffi-ey Douglas Madge went on to give his first complete performance of Opus
Clavicembalisticum in Utredit, Netherlands, in M^ 1982, and pkjwd the entire third part of it in
London later that month. A commercial recording of the Utrecht performance was released the
following year. Since then he has performed all or part of the work in Chicago, Bonn and Aarhus
(Denmark) in 1983, Montr&J and Toronto in 1984, Viitasaari (Finland) in 1986, Oslo and Paris in
1988, and Berlin in 2002.

In the early 1960s, shortly before his death, Erik Chisholm, in an essay on Sorabji, devotes a page
or so to Opus Clavicembalisticum. Recallii^ its 1930 Glasgow piemi^te he says this:

"At that time Sorabji was a fabulous pianist and his performance of this amazing
work was equally astonishing judged purely as a display of pianistic virtuosity. At that time,
too, he played all his extant piano woris to me, not once but several times. I can well believe
that under different circumstances, if, for example, Sorabji had had to earn his living as a
professional musician, he might easily have had sensational success as a concert pianist, for
his performances 35 years aff> were quite sts^gerii^."

Earlier in the same part of the essay, Chisholm, with w^t now turns out to have been great
foresight, declares:

"The distinguished and highly popular English pianist, John Ogdon, has indeed played
the entire work privately and by all accounts is well up to all its enormous technical and

interpretative demands.

"If Sorabji would give permission for a pianist of Ogdon's gifts publicly to play his
music, it could easily be the beginning of a public appreciation of his music."

Now that the public has had opportunities over the past quartet-century or so to hear at least some
part of Sorabji's vast output, it seems reasonable to suggest that we are by now beyond "the beginning
of a public appreciation of his music." Sorabji indeed consented to this historic recording of Opus
Clavicembalisticum, and its first complete performance in England was given by John Ogdon,
likewise with the full knowk%e and gladly given permission of the composer, though not, it must be
said, in his physical presence.

1. Hutchinson, London, 1966.

2. Taplinger, New York, 1979.

Sorabji on the slopes above Corfe Castle in the mid-1 930s.

Photograph by Norman Peterkin (also attributed - less probably - to J. Muspratt).

Shortform-AnalyaiB oJf Opus Clavicemhaligticum

Kaikhoaru Sozahji

This analysis was written by the composer on three pages of manuscript immediately following
the end of the piece, followed by four pages of music examples. It was not included in the published
score, and it seems reasonable to assume that it was never intended for publication. Those familiar
with Sorabji's literary style may be disappointed by the prosaic, factual and brief nature of this piece
of writing. It should be remembered that Sorabji was always opposed to wordy descriptions of his own
music — no lengthy discourses on any of his works appear in his enormous correspondence, and this
is one of only two formal analyses of any of his works that he attempted. The analysis gives the
impression of having been written in a hurry and with little attention to detail, and the increasing
brevity of description of the later sections, together with increasing discrepancies in titling and
punctuation, point to mounting impatience with the whole exercise. The 'Theme Table' that follows
is comprehensive, however, so Sorabji obviously thoi^t the analysis worth completing, or had some
reason to do so. It could be that he thought that this brief outline of the work would be of interest to
a friend (it is not clear to whom, although Erik Chisholm, who presented the concert in which Sorabji
gave the first performance, is an obvious possibility), or would aid the work's accessibility to a
prospective publisher, who might otherwise find its size and unfamiliar style daunting (in the event
the piece was published at the composer's fiither's expense). The other analysis that Sorabji wrote was
of the Fourth Piano Sonata, the work that almost immediately preceded Opus Clavicembalisticum
in the composer's output. The Fourth Sonata was also presented in a concert under Erik Chisholm's
auspices, which suggests that the analyses were connected in some way with the concerts, either being
read out in an introductory talk, or printed in the programme (although surely this could not account
for the copious music examples). The underestimated length of the work (see footnote 2) definitely
imfdies dut the analysis preceded the first performance. However, no documentary evidence has so far

come to light to clarify this matter.

The analysis as printed here conforms to the punctuation, titling and layout of the composer's
manuscript.
C.H.R.

Shortform- Analysis of Opus Clavicemtalisticum
Tkis work is admittedly an essay in tke form adumtrated ty tke immortal BUSONI in liis great

FANTASIA CONTRAPPUNTISTICA wliidi, witli tlie Hammerlclavicr Sonata and tke
REGER Variations on a tliemo ol BACH are tliree of tlie sii])rcme works for tke piano. Like tke
FANTASIA CONTRAPPLINTISTICA, tke Opus Clavlcemkalislicum is primarily a Fugue-
Sequence, kut wkereas in tke BUSONI work tke first tkree fugues run on consecutively and are
connected Itkeniaticallyl ' tke fugues of tke Opus Clavicemkaksticum are all tkematically self
contained and separated ky extended interludes and caden/.e and it is not till tke CODA
STRETTA of tke wkole work tkat tkemes of preceding fugues are woven into tke texture. My
"Opus" continues tke task of my contrikution to tke tkeory (my own) of "one programme one work"
wkick it still fiirtlier extends occupying tke lengtk of a full ordinary programme (2 kours approxi-
mately) for its performance. ' Tke "Opus" falls into tkree kroad divisions indicated as PARS PRIMA,
PARS ALTERA and PARSTERTIA respectively.

I. PARS PRIMA

Tkis section consists of (I) Introito: a skort section exposing tke five tkemes of tke Ckoral Prelude.
Tke initial descending passage marked "declamato con enf asi e for/.a" is in tke nature of a motiv and
frequently reappears in various guises in tke course of tke work. (II) Tkis suksection is tke Ckoral
Prelude proper; a skort linking passage marked NEXUS ser\'es as a connecting liids. Tke five tkemes
are fully and elakorately treated in tke Ckorale Prelude wkick after a climax suksides on to a skort
pedal figure over wkick is quietly intoned a forecast of tke sukject of tke first Fugue.

ni Tke first Fugue is a delikerate-paced 4 voiced specimen witk two cotmter-subjects
wkick are ikemselves fugally treated in an extended episode. Tke sukject is treated in all four ways of
straigkt, reversed, inverted, inverted and reversed.

IV Tke Fantasia is a Toccata-like movement kased on preceding tkemes. In tke final Bars
is added a motto kased on tke initials C. G. H (Bll). D of tke Gentleman to wkom tke work is
dedicated.

VTk e Second I'ugue is doukle: occasional allusions to motti from tke first Fugue will ke
found in it. 1 ke treatment kecomes more extended and free — altkougk always rigidly oontrapimtal
and fugal. Tkis concludes tke first part of tke work.

n. Pars Altera

VI. Tke Interludium Primum is a tkeme of slow grave ckaracter witk 49 skort variations
of every kind increasing in elakoration and complexity as tke section progresses.

\'II. A rapid running CADENZA (I) filled witk many disguised allusions to earlier

tkemes leads to —

VIII. Tke Tkird Fugue wliick is triple ami x ery fully worked. Ecick section uses as
ooimtersukject tke forms of tke sukject in tke preceding section.

III.PAKSTFRT1A

lllis IS tlic ItJiit^cst section of tke work. IX Interludium Alterum is an exleiiJed section in tliree
divisions a loccata an Adagio and Passacaglia witk 81 Variations. Contijuially Iresk tkemes are
introduced as eack movement of tke work arrix es. \'erv many aiul tllx crsil led L'inds of treatment
from simple two part Counterpoint to tke most elaliorate and intricate of decorative arakesque are
appkedto tlie Passacaglia tkeme.

X. Is a skort Cadenza in ckord formations leading to tke

XI. Fourtk Fugue wkick is quadruple, All four sukjects keing fully treated: tke

XII. CODA S 1 RF 1 1 A is tken readied — a most intricate and complex weft of tkemes
from tke entire work culminating witk a powerful declamation of tke Ist Sukject of tke first Fugue
witk supreme power and massiveness.

Nate: Separation and performance of any section or suLsection apart from tke wkole work is
atsolutely proliiliited. Tke work is only intended for pianist-musicians of tlie lii gkest
order. Indued il^ iiilcUocUial antl kvlinical difficulties place it lieyond tlie reacli t)f any
others — it is a weiglity and serious contritution to tke literature of tke piano, for senous
musicians and senous listeners, only.

1. Sorabji deleted this word in the manuscript. There are thematic references to the first two fugues in the third, but they
are not extensive.

2. The composer presumably means diat die work, at 2\ hours, is intended to substitute for a full ordinary programme,
without intending to imply that an ordinary programme would be of this length. On the subject of timings for Opus
Ciavicembalisricum, it is worth noting that these can be misleading, even when they might reasonably be assumed to be
accurate. The timing that the composer envisaged (and that which he took in his 1930 performance) can be called into
question for a start. In his programme notes for the concert, Erik Chisholm stated that the work would last "2 \ to 3 hours",
including intervals "of 5 to 10 minutes". The following day, the Glasgow Herald mentioned two intei^'als "of 10 minutes
or more" in a performance that lasted "in total a little over two hours". In an article in the same newspaper five years later,
Chisholm (who is said to have turned pages at the performance) said that the performance lasted "more than 2 \ hours with
intervals". However, Chisholm's sister (who was at the performance) and the composer (who gave it) both stated
unequivocally that no intervals took place. Then we have the question of the infamous 1936 John Tobin performance of
the first part of Opus Clavicembalisticum. A critic has suggested that if Socabji really intended that the work last about
2 hours, since the present recording lasts about twice that length of time, Tobin vras "as good" as Ogdon. No. Contemporary
accounts (Edward Clarke Ashworth, writing in The New English Weekly; J.A.W. (Jack Westrup?); the composers
t liiin[ihrcy .Searle and Mcrvyn Vicars (both of whom were at the perh)rmance} and Sorabji himself (who later denied that
he was there, although Vicars said they were there together) put rhe iiniint; of Tobin's performance at 80 minutes
(Ashworth) and 90 minutes or thereabouts (e\c! yhod)- else). Ashworth wrote ili.u Sor.ibji told him that the first part ought
to last 40 minutes. For the record, Ogdon look 5t niiiuites in the preseiu recording and 40 in his l^JHS Q'-'*-''-'''' l'-li/:'heth
Hall performance; Geoffrey Douglas Madge (live periorinance. l')S2) took 47.

It is possible to he deceived about timings, even under favourable conditions, and in this connexion it is worth considering
Yonty Solomons first performance of Sorabjis Third Piano ScHUUa at the Wymote HalL Three critics reviewed the
performance, giving timings. The Daily Telegraph gave the duration as 65 minute^ The Guardian, 75 minutts, v^iile The
limes' timing vm 90 minutes. It would seem that these statisrics tell us less about die duration of the piece than about the
reacdons of difierent listeners, a principle which may be assumed to be generally applicable.

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Opu0 Clavicemhalistioum — a Critical Analyeis

Ronald Stevenson

Opus Clavicembalisticum is Sorabji's masterpiece, in the sense that it marks his emergence from
the period of apprenticeship through which every composer must pass; and stamps his originahty
upon every page with the inerasabihty of a watermark.

Besides its ordinary edition, the work appeared in a special hmited edition of twenty-three copies
printed on Whatman hand-made paper, each numbered and signed by the composer. The long folio
format (bound in golden mottled 'pewter' paper, lettered in 'Othello' bold face), the superb heavy
paper (252 pages with generous margins) and the fine Viennese printing (inevitably, with such a long
work, containing a number of misprints) all constitute a collector's item of great value.

The work carries the imprimatur of Curwen, London, who first managed the publication. Later
it was placed into the hands of Oxford University Press.

Opus Clavicembalisticum bears the following unique dedication:

TO MY TWO FRIENDS <E DUOBUS UNUM>>t
HUGH M'DIARMID

AND

C.M.ORIEVE
LIKEWISE

TO THE EVERLASTINO QUMY OF THOSE FEW

MEN

BLESSED AND SANCTIFIED IN THE
CURSES AND EXECRATIONS OF THOSE
AAANY

WHOSE MUUSB IS BTHiNAl DAMNATMM

Facing the dedication, the composer prints vibsx he calls the 'constitution of the work', an

impressive ichnograph:

PARS PRIMA

PARS ALTERA

PARS TERTIA

II.

III.

IV.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

XI.

XII.

INTROITO
PRELUDIO CORALE
FUGAI
FANTASIA

FUGA A DUE SOGGETTI
INTERLUDIUM PRIMXJM
(THEMA CUM XLIX VARIATIONIBUS)

CADENZA I

FUGA A TRE SOGGETTI

INTERLUDIUM ALTERUM

(TOCCATA: ADAGIO: PASSACAGUA CUM LXXXI

VARIATIONIBUS)
CADENZA II

FUGA A QUATTRO SOGGETTI
CODASTRETTA

Comparison of this plan with the distribuaone deWopem appended by Busoni to his Fantasia
Contrappuntistica (edizione definitiva, 1910) reveals the fans et origa of Sorabji's formal conception.

Here is Busonis plan:

EARS PRIMA

1
1.

TT
IX.

ITT
ill.

rUljA 11 (a due soggettij

IV.

rUljrA 111 tre so^ettij

PARS ALl E.KA

V 1.

VARIA7TONIF 1

VU.

VAKlA/,liJJNb 1

Vlll.

VAKlA/,lUJNr. o

PARS TERTLA

IX.

CADENZA

FUGA IV (a quattro so^tti)

XI.

CORALE

XII.

STRETTA

Busoni told Hugo Leichtentritt that the Fantasia Contrappuntistica was, in its architectonic
aspect, based on the proportions of the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. If the image is taken
suggestively rather than literally, it may illumine to liken Sorabji's magnum opus to such grand
architecture as the Temple of Ranpur. Standing on a lofty foundation 200 feet square, this glory of
Indian architecture is surrounded by a range of 86 ceils, each bearing a pyramidal roof or sikra. It
contains five shrines, the central one having a quadruple image of Adinath. There are 20 domes,
21 feet in diameter, supported by over 400 columns enclosing the shrines — a multi-columnar vista,
like an intimation of infinity. The colouristic cadenzas in Sorabji's music, which set off the
atchiteaonic counterpoint of die fiigues, may be likened to the rose-quartz Aravuli mountains which
rise behind the Temple of Ranpur.

To analyse adequately Sorabji's 252 pages bar by bar would take a fiir greater number of ps^s,
and the number of readers prepared to comb through such an analysis would be in reverse ratio to
its inordinate length. Here a general outline of the work, with occasional detail, must suffice.

PARS PRIMA

I. INTROITO (pp 5-7).

The work begins with an arresdi^ series of thineen notes, which inscribe a drooping arc, like a
rainbow dipping down into an abyss:

Ex.!

It is also like an awesome text pie&dng a Savonarolian sermon. Or it is Uke a superb tragedian's
soliloquy at the beginning of a momentous drama. Or it is like the music of great bells being cast
into the ocean from a high tower. It is all that and more besides, h is not a tone-picture of an
abyss-plumbing rainbow or of bells cast into the sea. But it is music which inspires emotions akin to
the emotions suggested by those images. This music's sonority on the piano suggests a mythical
instrument which would combine the ring of a trumpet with the peal of a bell. It would be erroneous
to think of the series of thirteen notes as a Schonbergian tone-row, for its 'freedom of speech'
embraces what twelve-tone theorists proscribe: the recurrence of a note or notes within the basic
series. Rather might we compare Sorabji's opening bar to an Indian raga: both present a basic pattern
out of which the music is woven. It is the practice of the classical singers of India to prelude their
song with its raga. Sorabji's first bar stands in that kind of relationship to his composition. The
methods of many twelve-tone composers are very different from that, for these composers are
generally at pains to conceal the random row which is the elementary arithmetical basis of their
composition; or if they expose it, they often also expose the tenuity of its aural relevance to the whole
composirion; aural relevance as distinct from visual relevance, for the human ear is as slow as the eye
is sharp to perceive niceties.

Sorabji's thirteen notes comprise: a chord of the 4th (root E), a passing note, an F major-minor
chord, a diminished triad (root E, with B flat) and a common chord of E minor followed by one of

D sharp minor. Thus the expansive, widely ranging melodic line contains a contracted inner
harmonic progression which moves semitonally round a pivotal E. This procedure is intimately
related to the opening harmonic idea of Busoni's 2nd Violin Sonata. The tonality is the same, but
Busoni's chromadcism is explicit where Sorabji's is implicit. Here is the Busoni:

J 1 ' ^ ^

r f * i

The interior chromaticism in Sorabji's theme is expressed by harmonic implication. Apart from
the passing note (note 4), which is later proved inessential when it is omitted from the theme, there
is a semitone between only the first of the thirteen notes and the last. Paradoxically, it takes Sorabji
thirteen notes to achieve the descent of the smallest interval used in his work, the semitone. This
indicates the largeness of his time-scale and how the most prosaic interval in Western music (the
much-suffering semitone) is in his hands shot through with a pr^ancy of meaning rivalled by few
composers.

Incidentally, Sorabji's 'down-bow' signs over his opening notes (indicating powerful emphases)
are derived from their employment in the slow movement of Busoni's Piano Concerto.

His musical 'text' stated, Sorabji selects from it the major-minor coalescence and develops it in a
figured chorale (Vivo e pesante molto), with a rapid arpeggio ostinato high on the keyboard; a chorale-
like melody which relates to the 4th-chord of the 'motto', emblazoned in bronze haut-relief octaves
in the middle of the keyboard; and an irregularly reiterated pedal-chord of D sharp minor, under-
pinning the whole grand structure — grand, not grandiose. The arpe^o figure spreads to the left
hand and the chorale melody rises above it, when the arpeggii contract to an accompaniment of
scalic quintuplets. This returns to the pedal chord of D sharp minor, over vtUch a brilliant octave
run, sweeping up and down the keyboard, interrupts the chorale in the improvisatory style of a
chorale-prelude. Then follows a new pass^, ^ain based on a reiterated pedal-note (a low C sharp
diis time). Here is a sonal premonition of sidereal space. The rhythm moves in changeless change.
The harmony consists almost enrirdy of common chords, but curious juxtapositions negate the
fiuniliarity into sounds so unfiuniliar as to b^n to approach psychic regions of experience. The

whole section of five vast bars has its direct model in the third page of Busoni's Fantasia
Contrappuntistica, as is immediately clear from a comparison of the texts:

BL,.3Ca>

Busoni's melody is taken from the Bach chorale, Glory to God in the Highest, to which Sorabji's
melody makes an oblique and occult reference. The oracular utterance breathes out mUentando. For
a few seconds there is the frozen fixity of a low-held chord. The Bach chorale reference dien inspires
an organ-like toccata passage of upward and downward rushing scales treated with chotdal accretions

which the composer expressly marks quasi mixtures d'organo. This plunges to the tock-bed of the
keyboard and another held chord. The opening arpeggio ostinato returns and the chorale in octaves
and thirds rings out above an imperiously reiterated pedal-note on the piano's lowest octave. Arpeggii
lap in a foamed iridescence of sound and a scale cascades down to the anchored D sharp minor pedal.

Above this, mystical chorale-chords rise like vapour.

II. PRELUDIO-CORALE (pp 8-19).

The opening motto and the chorale themes of the Introito are here developed against ornate and
richly varied scalic backgrounds. The style is improvisatory; the form, variations. In addition to the
themes presented in the Introito, two new ideas emerge. The first of these (foot of page 8)

is derived from notes 2-6 of the opening motto, though, through its rhythmic and harmonic
treatment, it sounds like a new theme. The second of the new ideas is introduced towards the end of
the chorale-prelude, and, consisting of an upward perfect 5th followed by a drop of a semironc,
appears as a premonition of the first fugue's subject, like a shadow cast before, and is tinged with an
ominous undertone of shuddering Faustus-feelit^. It may owe its inspiration to the theme which
accompanies the first entry of the three mysterious students from Cracow in Busoni's opera Doktor
Faust. Sorabji's chorale-prelude furnishes other evidence of having its roots in Busoni's Fantasia
Contrappuntistica, as is clear from the following juxtaposition:

E.x.%

CU.;..-UN.(..— , r

Like the Busoni Fantasia, Sorabji's work is a Kantian Musik an sich and, though written for piano, and
though containing pages beautifully adapted to the piano, might well be transcribed for many
possible instrumental combinations, or, perhaps best of all, may be pertornied' in the mind of any
reader expert enough to read it as he would read a book; no doubt occasionally using the piano as a
dictionary, to 'look up' the sometimes un&miliar harmonic vocabulary If the Busoni and Sorabji
works are biased towards one kind of instrument, it is to an ideal type of organ — which may appear
patadoxical, considering the designation 'for pianoforte'; but will appear as the truth it is, when the
piano's power of suggesting an ideal organ is r^lised; for an organ — solely by virtue of beii^ an organ
— cannot surest an ided aural projection of itself, but is, indeed, more liable, given un&vourable
acoustics (whidi are common!) to surest a caricature of itself, when the 32 foot vibrations threaten
to shiver the foundations of Viaorian architecture! Sorabji's 'ideal organ' sounds at the end of his
chorale-prelude, when he expressly marks an extended figured pedal-passage quasi pedaU soli.

III. FUGA I (quatuor vocihus) (pp 19-30).
The subjert (dux) is:

The first three notes of diis subject were fi>reshadowed at the end of the chorale-prelude. The second
constituent, the rising scale, is related to the chorale-theme (see examples 3(b) and 5(b) above). The
dux is in G sharp minor. The comes is at the interval of a minor 7th above, but this does not
establish a formalistic procedure: later answers arc at variable intervals. This formalistic freedom is
earnest of Sorabji's sui generis treatment of the fugal form. The other two major twentieth century
composers who have written extensively in the fugue form — Hindemith and Shostakovich — are
more traditional than Sorabji in their treatment of tonality between subject and answer: Hindemith
may depart from the tonic-dominant hegemony, but, once his ratio of tonality has been established
between subject and answer, he maintains it; and of Shostakovich's 24 fugues, only one of them
(no. 21 in B flat) diverges from his scrupulously observed classical principle of answering the subject
in the dominant.

Sorabji's counter-subject 1 (C.S.1)

plays an obhligato role throughout the fugue, that is, it is associated with every statement of the
subject. C.S. 1 is really a subtly concealed mirror-form of the subject, plus an appended figure of six
notes (x), as is demonstrated here:

A general view of the fugue would read as follows:

Inclusive no. of bars Ratio of bars
Exposition: p 19, bars 1-4 4 1
Development: pp 19-24, bars 5-38 34 8
Final section: pp 24-30, bars 38-75 yT_ 7

The barlines are used as phrase-punauation. Dotted barlines serve the purpose of the
conventional measure. (The bars enimierated above are counted as including both the ruled and
dotted barline indications.)

This general view is in relation to the form as it was established m the Bach tradition. Thus the
development is said to commence at bar 5 because, after the first 4 bats, each of the four voices has
stated either subject or answer. The final section is taken as commencing at bar 38 (p 24, line 2)
because at that point the original tone-centre of G sharp is re-established; and because it is
immediately preceded by an extended pedal-point, according to the principle expounded by Busoni
in his edition of Bach's Well-tempered Clavier: "The entrance of the organ-point ... announces, in
contrapuntal pieces, the beginning of the Third Part" (vide Busoni: note 2 to fugue XV). The
relative length of the sections — 1:8:7 — indicates that the yardstick of ternary form (the ratio 1:2:1)
cannot be applied in this case. On paper the form is cast in the ternary mould: indeed it is virtually
impossible for a fugue to be cast in any other form and to remain a fugue: but the aural impression

of this fugue is binary rather than ternary: an impression conveyed by three factors: (i) the exposition
is so concentrated that it passes into the development very soon after the inception of the piece;
(ii) the absence of a repeated tonal scheme in the exposition makes it sound already like the
development; and (iii) thete are two main fermate (pauses), both in the tonic, G sharp minor (p 24,
line 2, first chord, and p 30, line 2, first chord) and these serve to make clear a fundamentally
bipartite formal conception.

After the second fermata a second countersubject is introduced:

This is treated as ohhligato, with C.S.I.

Just how concentrated this fugue is may be seen from the fact that, during its 75 bars, there are
no less than 73 complete statements of the subject or answer. There are also .some partial statements.
Episodes are very few indeed.

The opening motto of the Introito (ex. 1) also makes three reappearances, gleaming sombrely
through the dark warp and woof of the fugal texture.

The general impression of the fugue is stark and forbidding. The opening 5th of the subject is
indicative of other passages of bold harmonic nudity. Sorabji evidently believes that the
contrapuntal principle of individual part-writing may be extended (or perhaps we should say
sacrificed) to the occasional writing of consecutive octaves, the constituents of which are
distinguished from each other only by slight rhythmic modifications, as between alto and bass, and
tenor and soprano in the 4th bar of the fiigue:

Ex. 10.

This kind of thing occurs very rarely in the fugue. If it were to recur often, it would create a dismal
impression indeed and would reduce a four-part fugue to one in two parts.

In contradistinction to such starkness, there are other — again infrequent — passages of
Tristanesque lusciousness, as in bar 2, p 22:

On the second Une of the same page, there is a canon based on C.S.I. , which again presents a
completely difierent harmonic texture, this time of a naivete which has much in common with
certain moments in the works of van Dieren, particularly the slow movement of the 5th string
quartet. Here is the Sorabji:

Such widely divergent elements as those presented above in examples 10-12 are somehow welded into
a whole in pages replete with every contrapuntal device, including cancrizans canons — and even

inverted cancrizans canons! At the end of the fiigue, after the attaceo of the first three notes has been
subjected to canonic entries embodied in a texture of orchestral density ^ there is a convincing
impression of esemplastic coherence and unity of purpose.

IV. FANTASIA (pp .^0-39).

This movement is a complete contrast to the preceding fugue. It is an extended perpetuum mobile
in rapid semiquavers, a mammoth two-part invention which, though fundamentally biphonic,
gathers in its course accretions of fragmentary references to the opening motifs of the first fugue and
of the Introito; and, near the end of the movement, a new idea appears, based on the initials of the
dedicatee:

Ex. 13. C. &. H, M'K.

No doubt Sorabji s admiration for the energumen of Scottish genius inspired him to supreme eflfbrt
of creative will in this movement.

It is piano-writing of a very high order, perhaps the finest of the whole work. It hints at
transcendence of piano technique, not only in Liszt's sense of a transcendental study, but in the sense
of surpassing the idea of a purely pianistic style by drawing into its net a diabolical suggestion of
violinistic technique, in the employment of glissandi chords (sliding from a black-note chord to a
white-note chord in demisemiquavers) and also in the marking "quasi pizzicato", which is even
repeated more audaciously as "pizzicato" (s'ld — tout court!).

This Fantasia is aquatic. Its sonorities shimmer in currents and eddies of sound. Rock-like octave
or chordal fragments are tossed in its tidal flood of semiquavers. It is laced with scalic sprays and
lashed with arpeggio breakers. It is a note-swarm. It is not a Jeu d'eau in the Ravellian or Lisztian sense.
It is never an impressionistic fountain of chromatic water-music. Its line is never sprinkled with grace-
notes of Beardsleyesque fringe-dots. Rather should we compare it to the firm, wiry line of Leonardo's
late studies in hydrology; or to the fanged serpent-waves of Hokusai's 'Mangwa'.

Towards the movement's close, agitation whips it up into a clotted yeasty texnire, like concretions
of fbam-mafses after a prolonged storm.

In the bitonal close die employment of a mere semitone raises the music's brilliance to an even
higher dimension and su^ests a graphic image of a leaping crested wave:

This Fantasia suggests the purity, the power, the movement and the mystery ot many waters.

V. FUGA II (duplex) (pp 39-58).

Whereas the first fugue was stark Ui^e a rock-framed Northern sea-scape, the second fugue has the
lightness and the limpidity of a Mediterranean pastoral scene. Whereas the rhythms of the first fugue
had the gaunt irregularity of a rock range, the rhythms of the second fugue have the harmonious
groupings of a dance en plein air. The first fugue's subject contained such rhythmic complexity that,
especially with the later stretti, it presented ever new aspects in difierent contexts; the time-stature
(if marked) would have been

24 (3+2+4+2+3+2+2+2+4).
4 4

The subject of the second fi^e, however, is almost entirely divided into bars of 3/2 which casts it
into a type of coumnte:

The subtly shifting modal inflections of the theme lend it a charm tinctured with an elusive archaic
quality. The answer is given at the interval of a 6th. Sixths and thirds sweeten the harmony and play
a greater part in this music than they did in the first fugue, which was characterised by a harmonic
lai^ua^ employing a more liberal use of angular sevenths, fourths and fifths. What fifths there are in
this second fiigue add a bucolic touch to the harmonious flutings of the dance-like counterpoints.
The countersubject

is not an inseparable adjunct to the theme in this fugue. It is sometimes replaced and varied by the
reappearance of the first fugue's countersubject and by low octave reminiscences of the first fugue's
subject, whose menacing rising 5th, followed by the semitone drop, momentarily clouds the pellucid
atmosphere of the second fiigue. From ex. 16, the mediseval, proven^al, livre d'heures mood of this
movement will be evident. The sound of flutes and tambour de Basque, "arpes et luthes", is evoked by
this music. But the delectable mood is evanescent. As the fiigue develops, it becomes progressively
sterner and gradually assumes a formidable aspea not unlike that of the first fiigue.

The fi}rm of the first half of this double fi^e stands forth most clearly when considered as a brief
exposidon followed by an enended development. Any paramount conception of coda or climax is
precluded by the non-existence of the emphatic cadential 'landmarks' of the first fiigue. Here
everything drives onward. Some justification could be argued for the two closing pages of the first
half, with their augmentations ringing out in minims across the couranteA^i.t quaver texture,
constituting a coda. But these two pages are not preceded by a pedal, as a coda often is in classical

fugue form; and neither does any well defined tonality lend substance to this interpretation of the

formal argument. The tonaliry is in a constant state of flux. It was so even in the fiigal subject itself
(ex. 1 5), with its recurrent chromatic contradictions, which may best be explained as polymodality.
The first half of this double fugue had its tonal centre in B flat, and, after charting many modulations,
ends on a resolute chord of G major. The second subject begins on that chord, embedded within it.
If the first half of the fugue was dance-like, the second half is song-like. The second subjea

suggests a 'cello, but, if it were pkyed on a 'cello, the high tessitura would make it imperatively
concerto-like in its technical difficulty. This wide pitch-range is extremely rare fijr a fiigal subject and
creates a complex texture replete with overlappings of parts. But such is the beautiful clarity of its
lyricism that it shines through the amassing of sound which accompanies the fugue's ptogress. The
tonality here is more clearly defined than it was in the dance-like first half of the fugue; and this, too,
creates clarity. There is a distinct suggestion of C minor at the beginning of this song-like theme, a
suggestion which is confirmed by the answer.

A short episode (p 49, line 3) — and episodes are very few in the closely reasoned Sorabjian fugue
— is curiously reminiscent of the thirds and sixths of Chopin's G major Nocturne, op. 37, no. 2:

This is given as an almost unique example of the detection of any derivative elements in Sorabji's
music, which, apart from the manifestly intentional references to Busoni's Fantasia
Contrappuntistica, are almost non-existent. The example is also oflfered as a case of the rule-proving
exception.

The tempo moderato tempers the dance-like first subject, which was originally marked animato
assai. When the two arc combined, it is the song-like element that prevails. This cantahile is
developed in more frequent episodes. The form of this second half of the double fugue, as well as the
tonality, also bears a more direct relationship with the traditional form than the first fugue did. The
ternary ratio of 1:2:1 is clearly followed in the brief exposition and coda, flanking the extended
development, and an organ-point of a thick 5-note chord, with a manual-like stretto in quavers above
it, clearly presages the coda, which presents dose stntto and a restatement of the opening C minor
tonality.

Rinfare chords (marked quasi "mixtures" martelkto) herald the splendour of the double file's
close, the refining, splendour of a sunset. The long drawn-out diminuendo cadence is enigmatic
tonally, for, instead of ending on C, it ends on a strange chord

above an A flat pedal, which recalls the first fugue and thus at this stage of the work (the end of the
first of the three main parts), provides a cotmecting link with the G sharp pedal-notes of the first
fiigue.

PARS ALTERA

VI. INTERLUDIUM PRIMUM (Thema cum variationibus) (pp 59-98).

This interlude is cast in the form of a chorale-like theme virith variauons. The theme deserves to
be quoted in extenso:

Here is enshrined the heart of the work, Uke an unguent in an alabastrine casket. I'or assuredly this
chorale epitomises the anointed spirit which consecrates the whole work. The theme's legatissimo has
the smoothness of alabaster; its adagissimo has the masslveness of alabaster; and the chromaticism has
the fine granularity of alabaster. Or ^ain, this chorale stands like a dedication tablet in a great
building. There are forty-nine variations, which, through viny entanglements of figuration, or

through dense polyphonic webs of sound, preserve the outlines of the theme. In this sense, the
variations, despite their kaleidoscopic range of expression, are related more to the classical 17th and
18th century variation form than to the modern variation form, which, as practised by such masters
as Elgar and Richard Strauss, often uses the theme merely as a point d'appui and frequently digresses
fi:om it. (Indeed that type of variation-form would more fittingly be described as 'digressions horn a
theme', rather than Variations on a theme'.)

A sentence m^t be written about each of Sorabji's variations, but that pioceduie would hardly
add to the general impression attempted above, and may even detract fixjm it. Instead of that plan,
a few of the variations which present points of salient interest have been selected for more detailed
comment.

It would be incorrect to assume that the piano writing is consistently virtuosic. Variation 9 is a
two-part invention of irreducible simplicity, treating the chorale-theme as cantus fermus with a slow-
flowing quaver counterpoint above it, both in the bass register.

Severe simplicity is also manifest in variation 17, but it is a simplicity which belongs only to the
idea of the variation; its problems of execution are of well-nigh insuperable difficulty, even with the
employment of the Steinway middle pedal. The antiphonal character of the passage

could be better realised on two pianos than on one, though the coalescence of tonahties, caught in a
cloud of subtly pedal-held sound, may perhaps be better realised on one piano.

'Paganinesco' is the subtitle of variation 20, which is also marked quasi saltando. The virtuosity of
this music is the nth. d^tee of Liszt. It can be matched in the corpus of post-Lisztian piano music
perhaps only by Gino Tagliapietra's Tre Esercizii e Venti Variazioni per le Grandi Estensioni del
Pianoforte (Ricotdi, 1925)'.

The Italian expressions accompanying variation 35 are reminiscent of the eloquent descriptions
used by Busoni on the score of his Piano Concerto. Sorabji here uses, in a Prtsto vivace, the
expression guizzando amie fiiimme (flashing like flames) to describe the sequences of rapid double
sixths which fuse major and minor harmony. Tovi^ard the end of the variation, the composer employs
the same simile in the phrase vanno morendo le fiamme (the flames die down).

Variation 38 presents an outstanding example of the fertility of Sorabji's rhythmic invention:

Above diis invocation of the 287 drums of India, a free quasi-improvised passage, marked oscuro
moves in low chords, like a threnody.

After the complex rhythms of variation 38, the following variation is of a lyrical simplicity unique
in the whole of the Opus Clavicembalisticum. This music refiites the error of assuming that Sorabji,
because he thinks in a highly complex manner, is incapable of ever thinking simply (But note the
wholly characteristic proviso following the tempo indication!). This entire variation is given here,
reduced from three staves to two (without altering any note), so that the reader may be able to savour
a self-contained passage of a more easily accessible aspea of Sorabji's work:

After the mature simplicity of variation 39, the last ten variations gather a fantastic wealth of
pianistic figuration. Variation 46 contains a 'reflection' of the chorale-prelude in the bass, below
scalic demisemiquavers which recall the Fantasia and, in unsolicited confirmation of my description
of the Fantasia as 'aquatic', bears the vroids scomndo, liscamente e liquido.

Variation 47 is marked Andante, con severitk ttidattica. This last word has perhaps never been
employed in a musical context outside the corpus of Sorabji: the austere polyphony is a pause before
the onslaught of the penultimate variation.

The final variation begins Modemto, insinmnte e carezzando and is kept pianissimo (in the
manner of Sorabji's 'hothouse' music) until the sudden resolve near the close, which is a
conflagration of sound.

The first interlude contains such sumptuous piano writing, contrasted with such severe
polyphony as to render it comparable perhaps only to Liszt's Todtentanz on the Dies Irae (a theme
which Sorabji has also treated in his Sequentia Cydica).

VII. CADENZA I (pp 99-104).

This cadenza consists of seven episodes linked in improvisatory manner. .

After the massed sonal effects in which the preceding interlude culramated, relief is given by
reducing the four-sttve high-banked texture to a single darting line of semiquavers on a single ba^
stave This line comprises roulades, scales and expanding broken-chord sequences. The rhythm is nch
in interest, for, while the semiquaver norm is constant, the groups arc arranged in unequal numbers
ofnotes, comprising four, five. six. seven and sometimes two semiquavers.

After this brief inttoduaory monodic passage, single bass notes echo the chorale-theme ot the
interlude. Then below the ever inventive semiquaver line, which now shoots off mto nMjor-minor
broken chords and long bands of superimposed thirds, bass octaves recall the countersubject ot the
second fugue (ex. 16) and also the motif of the dedicatees imuals (ex. 13). . . . . i

The single line of semiquavers sprouts ramifications of double-thuds and sixths over nch chordal

"'^"'T'C'suddenly the proliferating sound is drawn up to a compact texture of six-part chords in
dotted rhythm, marked con sentenziosita didattica, pesante e pomposo. A pause for thought.

But soon the thing "shoots up like a dragon" again, with a sweeping rapid scale, and the
principal tempo of the opening semiquavers is restored, though not in its single hne but m a rich
tapestry of densely woven sound. Chordal pedal-pomts punctuate the multiple sentences of miBic.

Towards the close of the caden/,a, the introductory monody returns in bass register. A chain ot
trills, also in the bass, provides a camusfermus above the tunning counterpoint, which soon cannot
be constricted to its low register but rises above the trills as they descend. , ^ , , .

A brief final section is constructed above an E flat pedal-point, with each hand playing
semiquavers and crotchet chords. The figuration rises to the top of the keyboard and is echpscd in a
final chord in which no le» than eighteen notes sound together (marked acuttsstmo grtdando
forsennatamente: lasciatt vibmre: very keenly and una>nstrainedly crying out: leave [the sounds] to
vibrate [in the pedal]).

VIII, F UGATERTIA TRIPLEX (pp 105-137).

The dux primus is the most beaurifiil melody in the whole work. It is blent of song and fantasy:

The second 'answer' adds harmonic and contrapuntal beauty to the melody of the subjea. It is
a moment of afflatus:

UZi.

Such harmonic appeal is very rare in Sorabji's fiigues. Their general asperity indicates that it were
better not to consider the fiigues as harmony at all, but as counterpoint without harmony, which for
the greater part they are, notwithstandii^ ex. 24; diete are combinations of sounds without a feeling
of harmonic progression. Any harmonic movement in the fiigues is transient and subsidiary to the
contrapuntal idea. The principal employment of harmony here is as cadential punctuation.

The development of the first section of this fugue is like a series of expositions, commencing in
two parts and gathering counterpoint in close stretti, until a cadential chord clinches the argument.

There are two passing references to the subject of the first fugue. These are absorbed in the

music's flow and their function is formal rather than dramatic.

Octave doublings of the two outer parts of the five voices announce the stretto, which builds up
the voice-leading from the previous four-part writing to no less than seven parts.

The dux alter is quasi-atonal or nontonal — perhaps the nearest approach to the Schdnberg of
Opus 1 1 anywhere in the work:

Two countersubjects are employed, the one quoted in ex. 24 and another in flowing quavers. These
countersubjects are treated in an extended episode.

Development by a series of exposition-like passages, remarked upon in the first section of this
fugue, is also found in the second section and adds to the fugal dialectics the impression of the
musical argument being assailed from various angles; an impression which is further reinforced by the
complete apparatus of fugal technique being deployed.

Again, octave doublings initiate the climax and the argiunent is arrested on a strong firmata
chord.

The dux tertius is prosaic:

— which the composer may intend as a correlative to the richly cantabile first subjea and the quasi-
atonal second subject.

In the development, the countersubjects from the first and second fugues engage in episodic
dialogue — a parallel passage to the episode on two counter-subjects in the second section of this
fugue.

The kind of development presented by the first two sections — accumulation of exposition-like
pass:^ — is also found in the third and last section and, this time, accelerations add to the effect

of argiunent assailed from different angles. The tempo reaches a fiery allegro before retarding to the
principal tempo of the fugue.

Octave doublings — by now the familiar signal for the inceprion of the climax — make the
conclusion of the musical discourse blaze with conviction.

A final bar of massive chords (molto adagio) — still bearing the imprint of the counterpoint, as
rhyolite shows the lava-flow in its structure — seals the end of the fitgue.

PAR.STF.RTIA

DC INTERLUDIUM B (Toccata: Adagio : Passaca^ia) (pp 137-193)
(a) Toccata.

The Toccata (Rapido) recalls the Inmito, with its deep-anchored D sharp minor pedal-chord and
the motto theme set against a scintillating semiquaver background reminiscent of the first cadenza.
The piano writing is prodigiously inventive. So is the harmony and the rhythm. The rhythm in the
foUowii^ quotation would be difficult to match before Messiaen:

The following diabolical suggestion of violin technique would be difHcult to match anywheie in
piano literanue:

The style of this toccata is improvisatory. Brilliancy is heightened by the frequent employment of the

piano's highest register.

(b) Adagio.

With the Adagio, we reach what might be regarded as the inverse of the Introito's opening motto
(ex. 1). It will be remembered that the motto inscribed a descending arc of sound which plumbed the
tenebrous depths of the D sharp minor chord. The notes rang out like an apocalyptic trumpet. Here
we have the ascent from the depths. The notes rise slowly in a diaphonous rainbow of sound which
tips the glacial heights of the keyboard:

From this moment we begin to glimpse the last mountain ranges of the work's end.

Comparison with the 'basic set' of Alban Berg's "Violin Concerto

is fraught with significance. The whole-note group of the last four notes in ex. 30 was associated by
Berg with his quotation of the Bach chorale Es ist genug which is very like Sorabjl's chorale in the
first interlude (cf. ex. 19). The subtide of the Bach church cantata no. 20, O Ew^it, du
Donnerwort, in which the chorale appears, is 'Dialogue between Fear and Hope'. This interior
dialogue is also found in the Opus Clavicembalisticum. If the !ntroito is 'Fear', the Adagio is 'Hope'
— the two magnetic poles of the work. When we recall Joseph Szigeti's conjecture that Busoni's 2nd
Violin Sonata with its variations on the Bach chorale Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seele, wenn
ich in deiner Liebe ruh may have influenced Alban Berg, whose Violin Concerto, composed in 1 935,
also climaxes in variations on the Bach chorale: Es ist genug! si nimm, Herr, meiner Geist; and when
we recall the intimate connexion between Sorabji's Introito motto theme and the opening of Busoni's
2nd Violin Sonata (cf the examples above, relating them) Busoni, Berg and Sorabji are glimpsed in
communion with Bach.

Ihe form of ihc Adagio is a large-scale binary conception, with each section juxtaposing a
nocturne-like passage floating on a billowy arpeggio accompaniment followed by an organ-like series
of 8-part block chords, marked con sollenita pontificale: grave e seven ma dolce. This formal idea is a
development of the plan which Chopin adopted in the Nocturne in G minor, op. 37, no. 1.
StyUstically, Sorabji's Adagio is a study in impressionism and, as such, has much in common with
Debussy's La cath^drale engloutie. Just before the close of die Adagio, there are references to the
Introito's motto-dieme, marked poetico. For almost the whole of diis movement, the tone-range is
strictly limited to ppp-mp. Only in the last slowly descending series of chords does the volume
increase toff. Finally, the moonbright sonorities blaze in the deep pool of a C sharp major chord. This
chord also completed the adagissimo chorale-theme of the first interlude. So here is a further link
between the Adagio and the adagissimo, and further justification of the correspondence
demonstrated above, when the two passages were related to Berg's Violin Concerto.

The ground-bass

pays scant tribute to the traditional triple time-signature, though the syncope of the minim, the
second note in the theme, and subsequent groupings of three crotchets may be oblique references to
the classical hall-marks of the form.

Like the Bach Chaconne, this Passacaglia is constructed in variation-clusters, in this case totalling
eighty-one variations.

The first five variations constitute the first grouping. They are cumulative, that is, they progress
from the monody of the ground-bass to five parts in variation 5, employing only the note-values of

the theme.

With variation 6 the five parts are reduced again to two, but variety is achieved by the new
flowing semiquaver counterpoint. Variations 6-8 again pile up the counterpoint from two to four
parts.

Variations 9-10 are respectively in three- and five-part writing, with a broken rhythm in triplet
semiquavers, a rest on the first of each triplet. The rhythm is fiirther varied by the introduction of
demisemiquavers and syncopations.

Variations 12-13 are grouped in contrast: the steady semiquaver counterpoint in double notes of
no. 12 is fbllovtred by all manner of rhythmic quirks and caprices in no. 13 (maiioedfotitastico).

The tmnquillo of variation 14 is similarly contrasted to the vivace of variation 15.

Variations 16-18 are moderato sempre-w&i a constant background of uninterrupted semiquavers.
To this group of three variations in moderate tempo is added the contrast of another three in quick
tempo.

From variation 21 to variation 52 the theme moves to the middle part, embedded in ever-
changing textures.

From variation 53 onward the theme becomes the melody and is subjected to a wide range of
treatment, from severe canonic imitation to Jardin parfume-like sensuousness.

Variation 53 is of especial interest. Sorabji never indulged in the 'oriental atmosphere' against
which he inveighed in his essays "Around Music". This variation, characterised as quasi tambura,
furnishes the sole example in Opus Clavicembalisticum of the blending of Oriental and Occidental
idioms (unless we include the 'drum'-variation of the First Interlude, ex. 21). The tambura is a
musical instrument common to Arabia, India and Persia. It is a large stringed instrument with a big
head and a long, gracefiil neck. Its four strings are gently plucked, one after the other. No Eastern
singer of repute will perform without two tamburas. They provide the fixed, regular drone-
background to the free improvisation of the song.

Ex.32.

The position of the theme, relative to the variation-groups, presents the broadest formal division
of the movement. Variations 1-20 state the theme as ground-bass; variations 21-52 transfer it to the
middle part; and variations 53-81 transfer it to the melody. Thus there is a roughly equal tripartite
division underlying the formal conception. Within that general plan, there are the fiirther groupings
of tempo and texture.

After the theme has been subjected to the consummately grandiose treatment of the final
variations, in which the white page grows blaclc with notes, the ground-bass theme is tesuted in quiet,
noble octaves in a brief Epilogue (largissimo e dolcissimo).

X. CADENZA II (pp 194-197)

This is built entirely of chord sequences in vivo quavers over a reiterated pedal octave A. It is
unrelated to any previous or subsequent material and its purpose is to provide relief from the
overwhelmingly accumulative eifect of the preceding Passacaglia.

XI. FUGA IV (Quadmplex) (pp 198-240)

The first subject

Ex. 33.

has affinities with the Passacaglia's ground-bass: both begin with the rhythmic sequence of crotchet-
minim-quavers and both are tinged with whole-tone-scale colourii^. The su^estion of sensuousness
inseparable from the whole-tone scale is curiously denied in Sorabji's marking of the theme: severe e
austero. This denial may be symptomatic of Sorabji's unease in accommodating a residual early
French-impressionist influence, which, by the time he was composing the Opus, he had largely
outgrown.

This quadruple fugue also adheres to and enlarges upon the Passac^ias piled-up construction.
The fugue does this in two ways:

1 : by developing through a series of accumulating exposition-like sections which b^n with two-
part close imitation and gradually add to the counterpoint until a four-part cadence is reached,

whence the scheme is repeated;

2: the note-value norm of the first subject — the crotchet — is accelerated, then retarded, then

accelerated by the three subsequent subjects:

—

" ' " —

Then, too, the excitement is increased by the required quasi-imperceptible increase in the tempo,
extending from the fugue's initiation to the stretta.

The extraordinary number of notes in the andamenti of the 2nd and 4th subjects constitute an

almost insuperable difficulty to comprehension — especially when one reflects that these subjects are
not only presented but combined with the other subjects — and in all manner of contrapuntal
combinations too! — near the end of some four hours of music, comprising concentrated counter-
point, relieved only by transcendental piano writing, with an all but total banishment of simplicity!

XII. CODA-STRETTA (pp 240-252)

The summation of the work begins with full organ-like counterpoint combining the four
subjects of the quadruple fugue in strettissimo. This is developed through various contrapuntal
combinations, the work driving on through with inexorable will. Towards the dose, the first subjects
of the 2nd and 3rd fugues are recalled martellatissimo, in h^ chotds. A piii larp is only a gathering
of forces for the final avalanche.

After a slight break the final cadence reiterates a chord of G sharp minor — the tonality of the
first fijgue — but adding a grinding dissonance which certainly allows of no complaisance in
conventional peroration. It is like Sorabji himself, protesting to the last.

1. Sorabji altered this to "UNUS" in his 'working copy', but "UNUM" is what appeared in all copies of the publication.
[Editorial footnote]

2. The music on pp 28-30 tesembles an orchestral score more than a piano score! The appearance of this music can be
matched in twentieth century piano music perhaps only by page 12 of Wladimir Vogel's Epitaffio per Alhan Berg (Ricordi,
1936).

3. Taghapietra (1887-1954) was a favourite pupil of Busoni.

John Ogdon, 1985
Copyright ©1985, C.H.R.

KiihhoBm Soxahji and Herman Melville

John Ogdon

"Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall." (Mehrille)

Kaikhosru Sorabji, in "Mi Contra Fa", speaks of Toscanini, Busoni and Heifetz as beings "set
apart". Had his context admitted extension beyond the realm of music, he could well have included

the name of Herman Melville.

Why is this? E. M. Forster, in "Aspects of the Novel", pays tribute to the unique depth and power
of Melville's finest work, "Moby-Dick"; prophetic of Joyce's use of myth and fabulous resurrection in
the dream-plumbed world of Finnegan's Wake, it is also subject to a more directly sexual analysis, as
D. H. Lawrence showed in one of his finest essays (Studies in Classic American Literature), and is thus
accessible to both Jungian and Freudian analysis. It is no accident that Jui^ found it the most
interesting American novel, and a treasure-house of symbolism.

In what lies its lasting appeal? Lawrence si^ests that its meaning is puzzling not only to us, but
that it also was to its creator:

"Of course he is a symboL

Of what?

I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it."
Somerset Mat^hi>in> however in "Ten Novels and their Authors", avers that we do well to approach

Moby-Dick as a straightforward whaling story without metaphysical overtones, cites Melville as

authority for this, and maintains that the finest parts of the novel are those chapters, such as "The
Grand Armada", which conform to this exciting exterior interpretation of the novel.

There is much critical support for a more symbolic interpretation: Lawrence notes that, "as a
revelation of destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow". And for E. M. Forster this sadness, so deep

that it becomes "undistinguishable from glory", seems to lead us to the heart of Melville's message.
- The style of the novel is elevated; a phantasmal whiteness, remote and majestic, owing immediate
allegiance to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym", enshrouds the more straightforward elements of the novel, which is also in the
-listic lineage of Milton and Sir Thomas Browne and, here and there, of Shakespeare.
Renouvier has said, "the worid is sufiering fiom lack of fidth in a tianscendenal truth". It still is;
Melville perceived a great truth and only lost &ith in the possibili^ of btingii^ it to the often
unsympathetic and materialistic peoples of his time after the &ilure of "Pierre", which was to have
been his "Book of the Sacred Truth".

Melville is not earthbound: his passion, like Berlioz's, burns with a fierce pure white flame; the
preoccupation with "I'homme moyen semuel" which is so typical of the nineteenth century novel is so
far removed from his art as is the sumptuous richness of Wagner's sound from the Himalayan rarity
of Berlioz's orchestral texture. D. H, Lawrence's acumen is at its highest when he says, "In his 'human'
self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally . . .
he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do."

The emotional and moral ambiguity of Melville's writing, which renders his message ineffably
tantalising, suggests, if one wishes to make a musical analogy, comparison not with Sorabji but rather
with Busoni, Bruckner, Debussy or van Dieten.
Consider the beautiful openii^ of "Pierre":

"There are some strange siunmer mornings in the coimtry, when he who is but a sojourner from
the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the
green and golden world. Not a flower stirs: the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have
ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and
feeling no refiige from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose. "

This might call to mind, by musical association, the opening of the Busoni Piano Concerto, of
Debussy's "Prelude a I'aptes-midi d'un faune" or "Gigues", or the Tema con Variazione for piano by
Bernard van Dieren, or the opening of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, beginnings (loomings) which
may prelude catastrophe or triumph, but which in themselves are uncommitted. Busoni, who shows
us triumph and exultation in the key of C minor, defeat and resignation in the major key, is
peculiarly fitted to serve as guide through the mazes of Moby-Dick, whose hero fights an evil that

only he can see, becoming evil himself in the struggle.

So, too, is Wagner: anyone who has heard the opening of the Second Acr of Siegfried
immediately possesses a key to the darkest pages of Moby-Dick. The mythological framework and
elemental imagery of the Ring furnish innumerable parallels with Melville's master-work.

But at the first great invocation in Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael", I suggest that comparison with
Sorabji is immediately compelling, for in the opening of Opus Clavicembalisticum, his greatest
published piano work, we find a clarion call, proclaiming fiiith in a transcendental artistic
truth: —

Declamato con enfan « forxa
Adag.o n

" " - n n

n n

n M n

n n

Like the opening of Moby-Dick, it is Lucifer-like in its pride; "faciiis descensus Averni" is the message
of its swift descent.

The spiritual Ishmaelism of Melville and Sorabji is strikingly similar. Melville, with little formal
education ("a whale-boat was my Harvard and Yale") went to sea when he was 18; in his early
writing he showed charming and eloquent narrative gifts which deepened at so ama^ng a speed,
commensurate with his deepening experience, that he was emboldened to declare, in his durty-
second year, "I feel that 1 am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shor^ (^ flower
must fall to the mould"; later he chose to change the course of his life by forsaking the voluble and
conversational worldliness and success of his early years for ever-increasing moral and mental
speculation ("wandering the barren deserts of metaphysics") and a mundane post in the New York
Customs Office.

Sorabji too had little or no academic musical education: he was largely self-taught as a composer,
and manifests in his early music a voluble richness and superabundance of &ntasy and imagery

^HleaU

similar to the cascade from the pen of the young Melville. A hot sensual haze shimmers and hovers
lazily in the beautiful tone-poems "In the Hothouse" and "Le Jardin parfimi^" *hich hold a place in
Sorabji's output comparable with that of "Typee" and "Omoo" in Melville's.

Sorabji also elected to change the course of his artistic 1&, by placing a fierce prohibition on
public performances of his music: this retirement fmm the public eye is applicable to Sorabji only as
composer and pianist — his letters and essays have continued to fire a broadside upon complacency
to this very day.

The changing attitude of these two men towards the outside world stems from the same cause:
both had messages of extraordinary difficulty and intensity to offer, and both felt that the machinery
of communication was inadequate; "all my novels are botches", wrote Herman Melville, asking
Hawthorne to forgive structural imperfections in his writing, for the sake of the all-pervading
"archangelic soul" behind it. The problem in Sorabji's music is not one of spiritual ambiguity, his
message being emblazoned in his music with exemplary clarity and fire, but rather of technical
complexity, in his immensely difficult writing for the piano. Well-intentioned and sincere perform-
ances in the 'thirties, other than the composer's, did not satisfy him that the drive and flow of the
music were being communicated to the audience, so he decided that if public performance could not
satisfactorily convey his meaning, then public performance his music would not have.

Melville found that in the material prosperity and expanding commercialism of his time there was
litde enough place for his mature work — with its emphasis on spiritual values and sympathy for the
under-dog and the castaway. A novel that was "the superbest prophecy of fascism that any literature
produced", as Henry A. Murray so truly says, had to wait many years before the world could
.understand its import.

Sorabji, too, has found the musical world at large unready to receive his artistic experience.
An emphasis on compositional techniques and post-Webernian brevity for their own sakes is most
uncongenial to him. The length of a mature work of his occupies an entire recital, which presents
great practical difficulties in performance, both for performer and audience, a problem which has also
been faced by Messiaen, whose finest piano work, "Vingt Regards sur I'Enfant-Jesus", lasts 110
minutes.

Messiaen, rather than Sorabji, might implore forgiveness for formal shortcomings for the sake of
le all-pervading "archangelic soul", bearing in mind the sometimes naif, often beautifitl and totally

direct religious tenor of his writing.

Sorabji, unlike Messiaen, shows in his mature work, and especially in Opus Clavicembalisricum, a
granitic command of form that is h^hly enviable; it stems, he has told us, f^om study of Busoni s
Fantasia Contrappnnfistica — he has extended die formal structure of his model to an impressive
Mchitertonic design. This permits a plasticity of detail within the broad confines of the scheme, and
diis conforms impressively to the need for variety within a basic unity which most of us desire in
approaching a work of art.

Opus Clavicembalisticum does suggest and invite comparisons with Moby-Dick. Here also a great
and austere formal scheme is set forth, while within its limits Melville is free to rhapsodise and
soliloquise (as his plot allows) with a lyrical beauty that leads us, as Viola Meynell has truly said, "to
the comprehensible limits of marvellous imagination".

Within the formal scheme of Opus Clavicembalisticum is much opportunity for die th^sody dear
to Sorabji, and in the Adagio — so prophetic, in its opening, of Berg's Violin Concerto — he calk
forth hallowed deeps, providing the most profound experience of die whole composition, reminding
one person, at least, of the sheer beauty of the opening of "The Symphony^ in Moby-Dick:—

"It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of ak and sea were hanlly separable in diat
ail-pervading azure; only, die pensive air was transparendy pure and soft, widl a woman's look, and
diejobust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, Ungerii^ swells, as Samsons chest in his sleep.

Hither, and diidier, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were
die gende thoughts of die feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,
rushed mighty leviadians . . . sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous
thinkings of the masculine sea.

"But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without: diose
two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them."

Both men draw heavily on the contents of the unconscious; diis is shown by a process of writing
"on and on" which would seem to shape, during the actual Creadon of their work, the quality of the
artistic experience communicated by it, rather than an experience implicit in the very undertaking.
Especially, in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, stigmatised as "journalism" by D. H. Lawrence, one
cannot feel that Melville knew to what levels of feeling his Muse would later lead him.

What of MeWille's later work? Has this any point of contact with the kter (otipltMthed) work of

Sorabji? There is a strong connection in their attitude towards publication: Melville, in the last
twenty-five years of his life, showed great unwillingness to publish, regretting the publication
(financed by his uncle) of "Clare!", and thereafter publishing only two slender volumes of poetry in
limited editions. Sorabji, likewise, has published nothing since the appearance of Opus
Clavicembalisticum in the 'thirdes.

Melville's refusal to publish, and his constandy increasing verbal economy (which may be observed
from 1854 onwards) stem from his tired, rested state of mind which, in the short story "Bartleby",
approaches clinical "negativism". Sorabji, however, takes pride in ever-increasing proliferation and
exuberance of detail in his vast "Jami" Symphony and the Opus Archimi^cum for piano.
Nonetheless, a glance which the composer most kindly gave me at the Sequentia Cyclica, dedicated
to Egon Petri, seemed to show, compared with Opus Clavicembalisticum, a greater austerity in
keyboard writing coupled with harmonically thoughtful penetration of the rarest beauty.

Melville's comment on a statement by an editor of Chatterton's Poetical Works, who wrote,
"though Shakespeare must ever remain unapproachable", was "Cant. No man 'must ever remain
unapproachable.'"A similarly honest and incisive directness has always informed Sorabji's criticism.
He has never been one of those many who are so hypnotised by a famous name that they forswear
their critical faculties. Nor has he ever been afraid to ai^ the praises of the lesser-known, in heroic
partisanship loud and clear. In this way he has done an enormous amount to create and foster
interest in the work of S2ymanowski, Medtner, van Dieren, Chausson and Godowski, to name only
five from many possible examples.

He does not share Melville's passionate feith in theoretical democracy, since he is intensely
aristocratic in his bdiefs. It is interesting to nott that Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne written in
1851, says: "There have been those who, vi4iile earnest on behalf of political equality, still accept the
intellectual estates."

This would seem to imply that Melville, in practice, held a less democratic viewpoint than that
which he propounded in "White Jacket".

Sorabji does share with the great novelist a belief in intense individuality and in the necessity of
remaining absolutely true to one's artistic credo without compromise and without fear. It is
significant that as an expression of his sense of vocation and immense conviction he should open "Mi
Contra Fa" with a quotation from Norman Douglas' "Alone", which ends: —

"While others nurse their griefs he nurses his joy. He endeavours to find himself at no matter what
cost, and to be true to that self when found, a worthy occupation for a lifetime."

Arid the title of the book is perhaps more significant than the quotation from it, for Sorabji is a
man "very much alone, and on his own" in the world of contemporary music, even as Melville was
"a creature set apart" in the literary world of the nineteenth century. Full account wiU have to be taken
of Sorabji's extraordinary contribution to 20th century muac, just as historical perspective
demanded that the bitter criticisms and misunderstandings of MefadlkV work should be My
redressed.

Paul Rapoport. Alistair Hinton. John Ogdon, Ronald Stevenson and Alastair Chisholm, on the occasion of Ogdon's first
public performance of Opus Ciavicennbaiisticum (Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 14th July, 1988). Photograph by Cllve
Spencer-Bentley. Copyright ©1988 C.J. Spencer-Bentiey.

Notes on the Life and Career of Sorahji

AliBtair Hintoti

These are a few facts concerning Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. Born on 14 August 1892 in
Chingford, Essex, England, his Pars! father was a civil engineer and his mother apparently a
soprano. He lived almost all his life in England. Both parents spoke several European languages
and Sorabji's familiarity with those languages began at home long before he received formal
training in them. His education, both general and musical, was largely private. He began piano
lessons with his mother at about the age of six and later received tuition in harmony, counterpoint,
piano and organ from numerous teachers up to his mid-teens. He never received M-time training at
university or music conservatoire and was largely self-wught from this point onwards.

No 'child prodigy', he pursued with particular diligence the study of his first love, the piano,
developing a prodigious technique through a self-imposed dxoroi^ grounding in die keyboard works
of Bach and the studies of Czerny and Cnuner, Obopin, Liszt, Alkan, Busoni (die Klavierubung) and
Godowsky (the Studies on the Etudes <rf Chopin). Some of this practice was done using a Virgil
Clavier (silent keyboard). At the same time, his unusually enquiring musical mind led him to absorb
mudi of the important new music of the early years of this century. This put him, as a young
musician in pre-First-World-War England, to a great deal of trouble as recordings of such music were
virtually non-existent, performances rare and scores not easy to come by. As a result, however, he
gained a wide-ranging and up-to-date knowledge of developments in music throughout all of Europe,
from Albeniz and Granados at one end to Rakhmariinov, Skryabin and Medtner at the other. As well
as firing off many enthusiasms within him, this irrepressible pursuit must have done wonders for his
sight-playing abilities. Furthermore, he must have been a rarity amongst young musicians in Engknd
at that time, being aware as he was of Mahler and Schonberg.

His earliest extant musical works date from 1914 and his first critical essays and articles from
about the same time. He met and played to Busoni in 1919 in London, as a result of which Busoni
helped him get his First Piano Sonata published. Between about 1920 and 1936 he gave occasional
public performances and broadcasts of some of his own work in London, Glasgow, Paris, Vienna and
Bombay, althougji durii^ these years there seem to have been only four occasions on which anyone
else performed any of hU music in public. Between 1918 and 1931, fourteen of his worb were
published privately at his own and his father's expense and, in 1938, these publications all came under
the selling agency of Oxford University Press Music Department, where those not yet sold out
remained until 1988.

In Glasgow in 1936, Sorabji made his last public appearance as pianist, giving on that occasion
the premiere — and only performance so far — of his nine-movement Toccata Seconda. This seems
to have been the year in which he finally decided to let it be known that he wished henceforward no
further public hearings of any of his music without his consent, and he withheld that consent, almost
without exception, fijr nearly forty years.

Since he began his work as composer and author, a continuous stream (perhaps an Amazonian
flow would be a fiiirer description) of musical works (until 1968) and of literary articles, concert and
record reviews (imtil the 1940s) poured forth from him. Two books of his essays. Around Music and
Mi Contra Ea, were published in London in 1932 and 1947 respectively. He concentrated less on his
literary work after die 1940s, althoi^ a handfiil of articles and a plentiful supply of frequendy
vituperative 'leners-to-the-editor' have appeared since then.

Between 1962 and 1968, Sorabji's friend Frank HoUiday persuaded him to make private
recordings (in the composer's home) of more than ten hours in total of his piano works, including the
Second and Fourth Piano Symphonies, though these recordings were not intended for general
circulation. In 1970, two pieces from this set of recordings, Gulistan and Concerto per Suonare da
me Solo, were included in a three-hour broadcast in New York on Sorabji. This programme has since
been repeated on other American FM stations.

In 1954, Sorabji gave permission for some of his music manuscripts to be microfilmed and, on
numerous^ further occasions from 1978, many more such microfilmings have taken place with a view
to compiling as complete as possible a set of films of his musical works.

In the mid-1970s, Sorabji began consenting to numerous performances, broadcasts and
recordings of his compositions and, since that time, more than fifiy of them have been heard in
public, including the First Organ Symphony and Opus Clavicembalisticum.

1973 saw the resumption, after a short gap, of his activities as composer. The years between his
80th and 90th birthdays were very busily productive ones for him and saw the composition of the
Fifth and Sixth Piano Symphonies, several other solo piano works and a large rwo-movement piece
for piano and small chamber orchestra. Furthermore, at the age of 88, he received — and completed
— his first official commission, a fact all the more remarkable as the piece contains no keyboard part
and is scored for chamber ensemble, both rare occurrences in Sorabii's output. He did not compose
after 1984.

His compositions range in dimensions from Frammenti aforistici for piano lasting five or six
seconds, to the original version of his Symphonic Variations, also for piano, which probably plays for
at least seven houts. They include songs, a few chamber works, three orgjul symphonies, eleven works
for piano and orchestra, two vast choral-and-orchestral symphonies and an even larger Messa Alta
Sinfbnica for the same forces. The bulk of his work, however, is for solo piano and includes at least
sixteen pieces each having a duration well in excess of two hours.

The 1 970s saw the inclusion of Sorabji s Pastiche on the Waltz, Op. 64, No. 1 ("Minute Waltz")
by Chopin (the first of his Trois Pastiches of 1922) in an American anthology of 13 piano
transcriptions of this waltz — this was the first publication of any music by Sorabji for over 40 years.
Much more recently, in 1987, his Fantasiettina, composed in 1961 in honout ofHugh M'Diarmid's
70th birthday the following year, was published in England by Bardic Edition of Aylesbury — this
was the first time any music Sorabji composed since Opus Clavicembalisticiun (1929-30) has
appeared in print. Many new editions of Sorabji's works have been prepared in the years since 1988,

the largest to date being the Second Organ Symphony by Kevin Bowyer; this activity continues apace
and is of crucial importance in enabling and encouraging more performances, recordings and
broadcasts.

Chronological Ligt o( Works

Composition Oato Dedicatee

Transcription of "in a Summer Garden" (Delius) (pf) 1914 _ a

"The Popiars" (Duiid, trans. Selver) (v.pf) (two versions) 1915 _

"Chrysilla" (de Regnier) (v.pf) 1915 _

"Roses du soir" (Louys) (v.pf) 1915 _

"L'heure exquise" (Veriaine) (v.pf) 1916 _

Vocalise (vpf) (two versions) 1916 _

Piano Concerto No. 1 (pf.orch) 1915-1916 R Heseitine '

"Apparition" (MaliarmJ) (v.pf) 1916 _

"Hymne k Aphrodite" (Talihade) (v.pf) (two versions) 1916 —

Sonata (unnumbered) (pf) 1917 _

"L'^tang" (Rollinat) (v.pf) 1917 _

"I was not sorrowful" (Dowson) (v.pf) 1917 _

"Le mauvais jardlnler" (Gilkin) (v.pf) (incomplete) 1917 —

Quasi habanera (pf) 1917 ^ P&sm 2

D6sir 6perdu (pf) 1917 _

Piano Concerto No. 2 (pf.orch) (only i<nown to exist as 2-piano IVIS) 1 91 7 —

Poem "Chaleur" (orch) 1917 _

Piano Concerto No. 3 (pf.orch) 1918 C. Trew^

In the Hothouse (pf) 1918 t Jenidns *

Piann Hnnrprtn Wn 4 (nf nrrh^

1918

Fantaisie espagnole (pf)

1919

N, Peterkin

Sonata No. 1 (pf)

1919

F. Busoni 5

Trois poemes {v.pf)

1918-1919

M. Martine °

(i) "Correspondances" (Baudelaire)

(ii) "Cr^puscule du soir mystiQue" (Veriaine)

(iii) "PsntomifTiB" (Vsrlalnc)

Music to "The Rider by Night" (text, Robert Nichols) (vv.ens) (part lost)

1919

Tnrrata ^nf^

1920

T. Jenkins

"ARthA<tniiR" fSjiAmseddinl N of)

1920

R. Brittain '

Piann Oiiintpt Nn 1 /nf ^tr n\\

1920

R Heseitine

Pinnn Hnnrprtn Nn S fnf nrrh^ ^nuhlished as Wo 2^

1920

A. Cortots

1920

F. Busoni

Prelude Interlude and Fugue (pf)

1920/1922

R. Brittain

Sonata No. 3 (pf)

1922

A. Hinton 9

Sympliony No. 1 (orch.pf.org.ch)

1921-1922

lUI.IUI. Sorabji ^°

TrniQ nflQtirhPQ lx\f\

1922

i\\ Val'sp in D flat On 64 No 1 (Chooin)

III V ulOv III L/ Mulf \J\J- IHU. » ^UMUJJIM^

"Hahanpra" frnm 'Tlarmpn" fRizfttl
lui nauaiicio iiuiii xjoimiijii \uiz.>ji.y

(iii) "Song of the Hindu Merchant" from "Sadlto" (Rimsky-Korsakov)

C. ^-Becket Williams

Piano Concerto No. 6 (pf.orch) (numbered "ill" in MS)

1922

"To Bernard" "

nniKriiliim fnrrh^

1923

J. Ireland

Rapsodie espagnole (Ravei — transcription de concert

1923

(first version)) (pf)

Le Jardin parfum^ (pf)

1923

C. ^Becket Wliiiams

CinflUf! ^nnnRtti di Mirhpl/innpin Riinnarrnti hi nhamhar nrr>h\

1923

Trois Fetes Galantes (Vsrlsine) (v.pf)

1924?

MM. Sorabji

(i) "L'altee"

(ii) "A la promenade"

(iii) "Dans la grotte"

Piano Concerto No. 7 "Slmorg-Anka" (pf.chamber orch)

H. Ellis "

Organ Symphony No. 1 (org)

c. Edrotf-bmitii

Valse-fantaisle (Hommage a Johann Strauss) (pf)

H.v. Ivlarrot

Variations and Fugue on "Dies Irae" (pf)

1923-1926

F. BusonI

Trois DO^me^ rlii Riili^n rip ^a'rii /u nf\

1926

E. Chlsholm "

(i) "La lampe "

(ii) "La jalousie"

(iii) "La fidelity"

Fragment (pf) (three versions)

1 0OR/i QfiQH 0*37

U □iil'lnnr^ 1 Ft

H. Hutland '°

"L'irrem6diable" (Baudelaire) (v.pf)

1007

B. Marcnesi

Piano Concerto No. 8 (pf.orch) (numbered V in IVIS)

A. oOiliO ai oOllS

Toccata No. 1 (pf)

D. oFomage ^ '

Dl§mt (of)

10911

D U Dam* 99

R.N. Best "

Sonata No. 4 (pf)

p.b. oCuII "

Passacaglia (pf) (unfinished)

1Q9Q

Toccatinetta (pf)

iQ9a

u. uray-riSK "

Opus Clavicembalisticum (pf)

1929-1930

H. WOlannldK

Symphony (complete piano part of abandoned work for piano,

1930-1931

E. Chlstiolm

orctiestra, soli and chorus)

Vocalise (Movement) (v.pf)
Organ Symphony No. 2 (org)
Piano Quintet No. 2 (pf.str qt)
Fantasia ispanica (pf)

Pasticcio capriccioso (Valse in D flat Op. 64 No. 1 (Chopin)) (pf)

Toccata No. 2 (pf)

Sonata No. 5 "Opus Arcliimagicum" (pf)

Symphonic Variations (pf)

Symphony No. 1 "Tantril<" (pf)

Chromatic Fantasia (J. S. Bach — piano transcription with

a different Bach fugue) (pf)
Quaere reliqua huius materiei inter secretiora

(based on a short story by M.R. James) (pf)
Gulistan (the Rose Garden (Sa'di)) (pf>
St Bertrand de Comminges "He was laughing in the Tower"

(based on a short story by M.R. James) (pf)
Trois chants (v.pf)

(i) "Le faune" (Verlaine)

(11) "Les chats" (Baudelaire)

(iii) "La derniere fete galante" (Verlaine)
One Hundred Transcendental Studies (pf)
Rapsodle espagnole (Ravel — transcription de concert

(second version)) (pf)
Prelude in E fiat (J.S. Bach — piano transcription) (pf)

1927-1931 M.M. Sorabji

1929-1932 E. Emiyn Davies^e

1932- 1933 D. Saurat27
1933 A. Rowley 29
1933 M.H/l Sorabji

1933- 1934 N. Peterldn

1934- 1935 C. Gray-Fisk

1 935- 1 937 E, Clarke Ashworth ^
1938-1939 E. Chlsholm

1940 E. Edroff-Smith

1940 "To E. With Love"

1940 H. Morland

1941 E. Nason

1941 J.McArden/H.J.Cooper33

1940-1944 H. Welsh 3<

1945 —

1945 R.N. Best

Concerto per suonare da me solo (pf)

1946

N. Peterkin

Closing scene from "Salome" (R. Strauss — concert paraphrase) (pf)

1947

—

Sequentia Cyclica super dies irae ex missa pro defunctis

1948-1949

E. Petri 35

In clavlcembali usum (pf)

Symphony No. 2 "JamI" (orch.pf.org.ch.v)

1942-1951

M. Vicars *

Organ Symphony No. 3 (org)

1949-1953

N. Gentieu 3'

Un nido di scatols (pf)

1954

H. Rutland

Symphony No. 2 (pf)

1952-1954

H. Norland

Toccata No. 3 (pf) (lost)

1955?

C. Gray-Flsk

Passegglata venezlana (based on the Barcarolle from "The Tales of Hoffman"

1955-1956

Y. Bowen 38

(UttenDach)) (pf)

Symphonic Variations (pf .orch) (adapted from piano vrork of the same title)

1938-1956

—

Rosarlo d'arabeschi (pf)

1956

S. SItweil 39

Opus Clavisymphonicum (pf.orch)

1957-1959

J. Ireland

Symphony No. 3 (pf)

1959-1960

G. Richards ^

Suggested bell-chorale for St. Luke's Carillon (Campanile of St Luke's

1961

N. Gentieu

Church, Germantown, Philadelphia) (bells)

Fantaslettina sul nome lllustre dell'egreglo poela Christopher Grieve

1961

H. M'Diarmid

ossia Hugh M'Diarmid (pf)

Messa alta sinfonica (orch.org.soli.ch)

1955-1961

R,N. Best

Symphony No. 4 (pf)

1962-1964

H. Rutland

20 Frammenti aforistici (pf)

1964

H. Morland

Toccata No. 4 (pf)

1964-1967

RRapoport^i

Frammento cantato (v.pf)

1967

H. Morland

Concertino non grosso (4vn.va.vc.pf)

1968

M. Vicars

103 Frammenti aforistici (Sutras) (pf)

1962-1972?

D. Garvelmann *^

Benedizione di San Francesco d'Assisi (v.org)

1973

A.HInton

Symphony No. 5 (Symphonia brevis) (pf)

1973

A. Hinton

Variazlone maliziosa e perversa sopra "La morte d'Ase" da Grieg (pf)

1974

A. Hinton

Opusculum Clavisymphonicum (pf.chamber otch)

1973-1975

A. Hinton

Symphony No. 6 (Symphonia clavlensis, Symphonia magna) (pf)

1975-1976

A. Hinton

4 Frammenti aforistici (pf)

1977

A. Hinton

Symphonic Nocturne (pf)

1977-1978

A. Hinton

II Grido del gallino d'oro (variations and fugue on a theme from

1978-1979

M. Habermann

"Le Coq d'Or" (Rimsky-Korsakov)) (pf)

II Tessuto d'aratwschi (fl.str qt)

1979-1980

To the memory of

F. Delius ^

Villa Tasca (pf)

1979-1980

R. Stevenson <5

Opus Secretum (pf)

1980-1981

K. Derus

Passegglata variata (pf)

1981

C. Spencer-Bentle

Sutra sul nome dell'amico "Alexis" (pf)

1981

R.W. Procter*

Fantaslettina atematica (fl.ob.cl)

1981

A. Burton-Page ^9

Passegglata arlecchinesca (pf)

1981-1982

G.D. Madge

Sutra "per 11 caro amk;o quasi NIpote - 'Alexis'" (pf)

1984

R.W. Procter

a. This transcription was known from Sorabji's correspondence with Philip Heseltine to have been a
work in progress in September, 1914. It was not clear whether Sorabji had completed It. The

manuscript of the complete transcription is now thought to be in a private coliection in the U.S.A.

1 . The composer Peter Warlock. There was a long correspondence between Heseltine and Sorabji.

2. Scottish composer and life-long friend of Sorabji. Peterkin arranged for Sorabji's early
publications to come under the seiiing agency of O.U.R

3. Charles Trew. Sorabji's harmony and counterpoint teacher, from the years before any of the
extant works were written.

4. Friend of the composer.

5. See "Around Kaikhosru Sorabji" and "Notes on the Life and Career of Sorabji".

6. Marthe Martlne, soprano. She premiered the "Trols po6mes" with the composer, In Parte, WZ^ .

7. One of the composer's many friends who were not directly connected with the world of nnusic —
Rex Brittain was a barrister.

8. The famous pianist. He expressed Interest In Sorabji's works, but never performed ar^ in
public. They met in 1920.

9. Allstair HInton. Composer. Sorabji's closest friend from the 1 970s. It was mainly due to his efforts
that Sorabji was persuaded to give permission for the performance of his music in recent years.
He founded and is curator of The Sorabji Archive, and is now acting on Sorabji's behalf in all
matters pertaining to his work. The 1973 dedication of the 1922 3rd Sonata was, of course,
retrospective; an inscription in Sorabji's hand on the copy of its publication which he gave to
Hinton in 1973 suggests that there was another dedicatee at the time of its composition, but no
name Is mentioned and the Identity of that dedicatee remains unknown. Hinton met Sorabji for
the first time in 1972.

10. Madeiaine IVIathilde Sorabji, the composer's mother.

11. Christopher a-Becket Williams. Composer. Sorabji presented him with the manuscript of the
6th piano concerto, which was kindly given to The Sorabji Archive by the dedicatee's daughter

in 1988.

12. Probably Bernard Bromage (see note 21 below), as it seems improbable that Sorabji knew
Bernard van Dieren (later a close friend) personally at this time.

13. The composer John Ireland. He and Sorabji corresponded for about 30 years.

14. Havelock Ellis, psychologist and pioneering writer on the psychology of sexuality

15. Emily Edroff-Smith was a piano teacher, and a close friend of the composer's mother. She was
known as "Aunty Edroff" in the family

16. Friend of the composer.

17. Erik Chisholm (1904-1965) founded the "Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary
Music" which existed in Glasgow in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the leading figures who gave
concerts and talks for the Society were Berg (perhaps; this has never been conclusively
substantiated), van Dieren, Hindemith, Szymanowski, and Bartok, as well as Sorabji. Chisholm
was a composer, pianist, organist and conductor He was subsequently Dean of the Faculty of
Music at the University of Cape Town.

18. Harold Rutland was a pianist, and Professor of Piano at Trinity College of Music. He performed
the "Fragment", and was a lifelong champion of the composer's music.

19. Blanche Marchesi. Soprano. Sorabji devoted a chapter of his book "Mi Contra Fa" to her. His
"Villa Tasca" from 1 979-1 980 contains a passage which refers to her rendition of a Sicilian folksong.

20. Count Aldo Soiito di Soils. Italian pianist. Sorabji wrote several favourable reviews of his
concerts.

21. Bernard Bromage. He proof-read (albeit inadequately) Sorabji's first book "Around Music". The
dedication appears on the microfilm of the manuscript, which was made in the 1950s, but was
later removed from the manuscript itself.

22. Reginald Best, the composer's companion In his later years.

23. Francis George Scott was a Scots composer, especially of songs, some of wtilch are among the

finest written In the 20th century. Championed by Hugh M'DlarmId, who wrote about him In his
poetry and the autobiographical "The Company I've Kept", Scott has now fallen into undeserved
neglect. Sorabjl's "Ml Contra Fa" contains a highly enthusiastic essay on Scott's songs.

24. Critic, and close friend of the composer. He wrote at least one highly complimentary article about

SorabjI.

25. Hugh M'DlarmId (Christopher Murray Grieve), the Scots poet. One of the most Influential figures
in the Scottish arts. A polymathic intellect with an inclination toward epic forms in his own work,
it is scarcely surprising that he and Sorabji found each other to be kindred spirits. The first essay
in iVI'Diarmld's autobiographical "The Company I've Kept" (Hutchinson, 1966) concerns Sorabji,
and contains a passage of poetry adapted from the author's "On a Raised Beach" in tribute to
Sorabji, which ends: "Great work cannot be combined with surrender to the crowd", in a
pleasing example of the wheel turning full circle, this text has been set to music by Allstair HInton
(q.v.) in response to a commission which arose indirectly from Hinton's association with the
present recording. See also "Fantasiettlna ..." (1961).

26. Organist. He performed the middle movement of the composer's Organ Symphony No. 1 in 1928,
this being the work's first and only performance until 1987, and, incidentally, one of the very few
occasions on which Sorabji heard his music performed by anyone else.

27. Denis Saurat. French philosopher; a political and philosophical thinker highly regarded by Sorabji.
One-time head of the institut Frangais.

28. Pianist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

29. Edward Clarke Ashworth wrote an excellent review of the publication of Opus Clavicembalistlcum.

30. This was probably Edward Nason, to whom the other piece Inspired by an M.R. James ghost story
was dedicated. Based on correspondence between Sorabji and Frank Holliday, it has also been

suggested that it could have been Edward Clarke Ashworth. The composer denied this in
conversation with Allstair HInton, and insisted that the dedicatee was, Indeed, Nason.

31 . Harold Morland, poet (he refers to Sorabji in several of his poems). Friend of the composer since
the 1930s.

32. Friend of the composer. See note 30 above.

33. Joy McArden and James Cooper. Soprano/pianist and wife/husband. They performed the "Trois
chants" in the composer's presence, privately, and were given permission to broadcast them.
There is no record of such a broadcast having taken place.

34. Henry Welsh. Friend of the composer.

35. Egon Petri. A Busoni pupil, he became a close friend of Sorabji. He contemplated playing Opus
Clavicembailsticum but never actually did so. Interestingly, a propos the present recording, he
was John Ogdon's teacher.

36. Mervyn Vicars. Composer and cellist. A friend of the composer for many years, he wrote a work
for piano and orchestra on themes from Opus Cfavlcembansticum.

37. Norman Gentieu first suggested to Sorabji that all his manuscripts should be microfilmed, and
created a (largely fictitious) "Society of Connoisseurs" to facilitate this project.

38. York Bowen, the English composer-pianist. He dedicated his 24 Preludes for piano to Sorabji.

39. Sir Sacheverell SItwell, who wrote, In 1976, "It is a privilege to have been asked to write these
few words In praise and welcome to my old friend Kaikhosru Sorabji whom I have known, I think,
since 19181 a most vital, amusing and energising influence In all he said or wrote ...
Personally I have every sympathy with him over the aristocratic seclusion Into which he has with-
drawn and which I find both enviable and dignified." (Programme note for Yonty Solomon's
Wigmore Hall concert, 7th December 1976).

40. At the disastrous 1936 London performance of the first part of Opus Clavicembalistlcum there
were, apparently, protests from the audience on Sorabjl's behalf, concerning the quality of the

performance. According to the composer, George Richards was the loudest protestor.

41. Paul Rapoport Is a musicologist, critic, writer and composer in Canada. He edited the
symposium "Sorabji - A Critical Celebration" (Scolar Press, 1992).

42. Donald Garvelmann scripted and presented the three-hour broadcast about Sorabji on Radio
WNCN New York, In 1970.

43. Michael Habermann, American pianist. He has performed and recorded a number of Sorabji's
works.

44. Sorabji was a lifelong admirer of Delius, who In turn praised "Le Jardin ParfumS" when he heard
it broadcast In 1930. In a letter to the composer, he wrote that the piece "... interested me very
much. There Is real sensuous beauty in it."

45. Ronald Stevenson. Scots composer-pianist. One of the most extraordinary musicians of our time.
A pianist of unique Insight and prolific composer in many forms, especially song and piano
music, he is also one of the world's leading authorities on Busoni and Grainger, among others.
He has recorded Sorabji's "Fantasiettina ..." for Altarus Records.

46. Kenneth Derus has published a collection, with commentary, of the Sorabji-Heseltine
correspondence (in "Sorabji - A Critical Celebration", ed. Rapoport [Scolar Press, 1992]).

47. Olive Spencer-Bentley. Composer, currently working as a schoolteacher Friend of the composer
in his later years. The "Passeggiata Variata" was a 21st birthday present for Spencer-Bentley.

48. Robert W. Procter. Friend of the composer. "Alexis" was a nickname. The composer Incorrectly
dated the first of these pieces "1971" (using Roman numerals, as was his custom, this is an easy
mistake to make). He did not know the dedicatee in 1971, and the manuscript paper on which
they were written vras of the type he adopted after 1973, which suggests the later date. It now
appears that the second "Alexis" Sutra is the composer's last work.

49. Anthony Burton-Page. IVlusician and teacher. Friend of the composer in his later years.

50. Geoffrey Douglas Madge. Australian pianist. He has performed wori(s of Sorabji Internationally

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